The Moviefone Bloghttp://news.moviefone.com
The Moviefone Blog is the place for movie lists, trailers, trivia, interviews and features on movies out in theaters and coming soon.http://news.moviefone.com/media/feedlogo.gifThe Moviefone Bloghttp://news.moviefone.com
en-usCopyright 2015 Blogsmith, LLC. The contents of this headlines and excerpts feed are available for limited commercial distribution. You may repost this feed to your site provided you link back to the original story, do not edit the material, and do not remove this copyright notice.Blogsmith http://www.blogsmith.com/21214764It's been two decades, and still, the waves from the tsunami that was "Waterworld" have not receded.

Released 20 years ago this week (on July 28, 1995), the post-apocalyptic epic about the survivors of a drowned Earth became known as one of the most bloated flops of all time. That reputation wasn't really fair (the movie eventually broke even), but it was the then-most expensive movie ever made.

For a year before the film's release, stories leaked out about the waterlogged production's near-disastrous setbacks and its ego clashes between star Kevin Costner and his hand-picked director, Kevin Reynolds. Punsters were calling the movie "Fishtar" and "Kevin's Gate." By the time "Waterworld" finally came out, its underwhelming reception was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Costner's career as a bankable leading man has never really recovered.

In honor of the film turning 20 years old today, here are 20 facts you may not know about "Waterworld."

1. Initially, "Waterworld" was to have been the opposite of a big-budget blockbuster. Peter Rader's original "Waterworld" script, written in the late 1980s, was commissioned by Roger Corman, the legendary B-movie producer of classic sci-fi/exploitation drive-in movies (and more recently, SyFy channel monster mash-up movies). But the company ultimately decided it couldn't make the film for under $3 million, so it sold Rader's script.

2. By the time it landed at Universal as a Kevin Costner vehicle, it was budgeted at $65 million, a figure that would grow to $100 million before cameras rolled -- and $172 million by the time of "Waterworld"'s premiere.

3.David Twohy ("The Fugitive") was hired to polish Rader's script. Before the film's release, some 36 writers would tinker with it, though only Rader and Twohy received credit.

4. One of those uncredited script doctors was Joss Whedon. "The Avengers" filmmaker said he was essentially tasked with putting Costner's own ideas into the screenplay. He called himself "the world's highest-paid stenographer" and called the experience "seven weeks in hell."5. If "Waterworld" reminds you a lot of the "Mad Max" movies, that's not a coincidence. Both of "Waterworld's" credited screenwriters have acknowledged their story's debt to those two films. And Dean Semler, the cinematographer who shot them both, also shot "Waterworld."

5. For action that occurred on the surface of the water, celebrated surfer Laird Hamilton was Kevin Costner's stunt double.

6. Yes, that's a very young Jack Black in a small role as a pilot. "Waterworld" was only his fifth movie.

7. Most of the movie was shot on the ocean, off the coast of Hawaii. You'd think Universal would have known better, given the hurricane-plagued shoot they suffered there two years earlier, with "Jurassic Park." Indeed, a hurricane hit the "Waterworld" set, too. The storm sank the floating Atoll set, which then had to be rebuilt.8. Early in the shoot, co-stars Jeanne Tripplehorn and Tina Majorino (pictured with Costner) were thrown from The Mariner's boat when the bowsprit snapped off, and they nearly drowned. A team of 12 divers rescued them.

9. Norman Howell, the stunt coordinator for the underwater scenes, came up too quickly from a dive and suffered an almost fatal case of "the bends."

10. Costner himself nearly died during a sequence when he was lashed to the mast of his boat. The craft drifted off to sea, and it took nearly half an hour for the rescue team to reach Costner and untie him.

11. "Waterworld" marked the fourth collaboration between Costner and director Reynolds (their previous collaborations were "Fandango," "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves," and "Rapa Nui," which Costner produced but did not star in). Despite their long-standing relationship, Reynolds and Costner clashed over creative decisions. (Reynolds reportedly wanted the hero to be more stoic, while Costner wanted his character to be more swashbuckling. The performance seen in the finished film displays both traits.)

12. During post-production, less than three months before the film's release, Reynolds quit "Waterworld" (some reports had Costner firing Reynolds), and the star finished editing the movie himself.

13. Composer Mark Isham was fired for having created a stark, world music-y score that didn't seem to fit the tone that Costner wanted. At the last minute, James Newton Howard (who had scored Costner's "Wyatt Earp") came aboard and whipped up a traditional orchestral score.14. All the turmoil had caused the shoot to balloon from a scheduled 96 days to 157 days, and the budget swelled as a result. By the time distribution and marketing costs were added, "Waterworld" had a price tag of $235 million.

15. "Waterworld" opened at No. 1 on the box office. Over the course of its theatrical run, it made back $88 million in North America and another $176 million overseas. About half that $264 million worldwide total went back into the studio's pockets. It may have taken until the Blu-ray release in 2009 for the movie to finally break even.

16. Clever accounting on the part of Universal minimized the studio's losses. The movie was in production while Matsushita sold Universal to Seagram. But Seagram made it a condition of the deal that Matsushita hold on to most of the studio's debt, including almost all of the cost of producing "Waterworld." Seagram was on the hook only for the movie's expenditures that occurred after the sale closed in the spring of 1995, which amounted to only about $12 million in post-production costs.17. At the 1996 Golden Raspberry Awards, "Waterworld" was nominated for four Razzies, including Worst Picture, Worst Actor, and Worst Director. It lost three of the four, but it won Worst Supporting Actor for villain Dennis Hopper.

18. "Waterworld" also scored one Oscar nomination, for Best Sound Mixing.

19. Seventeen years later, Costner and Reynolds buried the hatchet and worked together again on the Emmy-winning 2012 History Channel mini-series "Hatfields & McCoys."

20. Fun fact: In June 2015, Tina Majorino tweeted that while shooting the film, she was stung by jellyfish on seven different occasions. These incidents inspired Costner to nickname her "JC," for "Jellyfish Candy."
]]>2015-07-28T14:30:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/07/28/waterworld-facts/21212225
As an actor who likes to perform his own stunts, Tom Cruise tends to set the bar high. Literally.

Certainly, there's something thrilling -- and probably a little sick -- about watching a person risk his or her life just to entertain us. Cruise has clearly gone above and beyond the call of duty for moviegoers many times, but he's also part of a movie tradition going back a century, of film professionals doing absolutely insane stunts just to wow us for a few moments. In honor of "Rogue Nation," here are 18 of the most astonishing stunts ever filmed. ]]>2015-07-27T17:30:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/07/27/best-movie-stunts-ranked/21214144Nobody expected "Pixels," Adam Sandler's homage to Pac-Man and other vintage video games, to gobble up dollars the way Sandler's movies used to. Yet "Pixels" still disappointed, even by Sandler's declining standards.

Predictions were in the range of $25 to $35 million for the debut of the action comedy. At least it was supposed to premiere in first place. But the movie may not even have reached those low bars. It opened this weekend with an estimated $24.0 million, putting it about $800,000 behind the week-old "Ant-Man." Those numbers may change by the time final figures are released on Monday, and "Pixels" could come out on top by the time all the quarters are spent. But it would still be one of the lowest opening weekends of Sandler's career.

It would also be the latest in a downward trend that's marked the comedian's box office for at least four years. Aside from his "Grown Ups" movies and his animated "Hotel Transylvania," Sandler hasn't made a film that grossed more than $75 million in North America since "Just Go With It" in early 2011. (That didn't bode well for "Pixels," which cost a reported $88 million to make.)

So what went wrong over the weekend? By most accounts, the movie isn't very good, earning dismal reviews from critics and a B grade CinemaScore. The video game nostalgia element worked in Disney's "Wreck-It Ralph," but there, it was also paired with some newer-style games, some completely invented ones, and -- more importantly -- original and heartfelt storytelling. "Pixels," however, doesn't have much that would draw younger viewers, or women, for that matter.

Plus, it opened on an ultra-crowded weekend. Not only did it have to compete against two other new wide-release movies, but it was also up against five more hit movies still playing in at least 2,600 theaters each. Among those are "Ant-Man" and "Jurassic World," that might have siphoned off older, nostalgia-minded viewers, while younger viewers would still have been drawn to "Minions" and "Inside Out."The underwhelming performance of "Pixels" highlights what a precarious position Sandler is in these days. For one thing, at a time when overseas revenues drive most studio decisions, Sandler doesn't wield the clout that action stars do. Comedy doesn't translate as well in foreign lands as action, and Sandler's movies do only about a third of their business abroad.

For two straight years, Forbes has put Sandler on the top of its list of most overpaid film stars, meaning that he's the leading man who offers Hollywood studios the lowest return on investment for his high salary. That's especially bad news for Sony, which had an eight-picture deal with Sandler that ends with "Pixels" and this fall's "Hotel Transylvania 2." The disenchantment of Sony executives with Sandler was apparent in their profane grumblings about him in e-mails stolen in last year's Sony hack.

Sandler may not care. He's making his next four movies for Netflix, which has promised to keep the budgets near $80 million a film, which Sandler is used to. Of course, the streaming site will actually spend less than Sandler's usual studio partners do, since marketing costs will be minimal and distribution costs non-existent. Box office also won't be a factor; if each movie helps Netflix recruit another million subscribers and keep them for a year, then Sandler will have done his job.

Sandler's older movies are reportedly perennial favorites on the streaming site, so having new Sandler product ought to help with subscriber retention. True, Sandler has already waded into controversy with his first Netflix production, "The Ridiculous Six." But no one is going to unsubscribe to Netflix because one of its thousands of offerings is a politically incorrect Adam Sandler movie.

Besides, Netflix is notoriously secretive about the number of streams each title generates. Whether Sandler's next few movies are enormously popular or as ignored as his last few theatrical movies have been, no one will know. Which means Sandler's bargaining position won't be hurt the next time he wants to make a studio deal and return to Hollywood.

Whether anyone will show up at the multiplex when he does is another story.
]]>2015-07-26T20:00:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/07/26/pixels-adam-sandler-box-office/21213443 I write about TV for a living, I watch a ton of TV, and I read a lot of news about TV, including a number of much-hyped stories that seem unavoidable all over the Internet. Yet even I can't bring myself to care about some of them. For instance:

2.The VMAs themselves. The one day a year MTV pretends it still cares about music videos. Again, a year from now, will you remember who won any of these prizes?

3. The Jon-Snow-Is-Alive rumors. Either he is or isn't, but I'd rather just find out when I watch "Game of Thrones" next season and not endure nine months of speculation.

4. Wealthy White Senior Angeleno Dads Who Become Women. Jeffrey Tambor deserved an Emmy nod for "Transparent," but his character's wealth and privilege and generally supportive grown kids make her transition story atypical... why, who did you think I was talking about?

6. James Corden's acting-karaoke bits that see him channeling the visually memorable moments of more famous performers. This week, he and Paula Abdul re-enacted the "Opposites Attract" video. Let me know when he starts aping Craig Ferguson, and I might start watching "The Late Late Show" again.

7."Lunch With Stephen." I admire Stephen Colbert's seemingly endless creativity and enthusiasm. He's so eager for the September launch of his "Late Show" that he's making viral videos for a show that hasn't even aired yet. But c'mon, these are just promos. Really clever promos, but still. These and the podcasts and all the other ephemera he's been dropping lately are threatening to make me sick of his "Late Show" tenure before it's even started. It's only seven weeks away, so go ahead, Stephen, make us wait, make us hungry.

8. The cancellation of "19 Kids and Counting." Maybe I would have cared if TLC had canceled it right away, instead of holding their fingers up to the wind for nearly two months. Instead, the network seemed to make a point of waiting to cut the Duggars loose until the family's scandal had fallen off the radar. Mission accomplished.

9."Fear the Walking Dead." Why does everyone keep talking about the zombie apocalypse like it's actually going to happen?

10. The media's bafflement over Donald Trump. We didn't create the "Apprentice" host-turned-presidential candidate, but we've given him decades of free publicity. (I include myself in that "we," for every word I've ever written about him, including this item now.) So we shouldn't pretend to be shocked and astonished every time he does something outrageous (insult John McCain's military service, give out Lindsey Graham's phone number), especially if we keep giving him more free publicity for every stunt he pulls.

11.Judd Apatow's latest anti-Bill Cosby rant. True, Cosby is fair game now for whatever ridicule anyone wants to throw at him. Apatow even returned to stand-up comedy for the first time in decades just to mock Cosby this week on "The Tonight Show." But when did the "Trainwreck" director become the king of Cosby Outrage? Who elected him (and not Hannibal Buress, who started this avalanche)?

12. Wyatt Cenac calls out Jon Stewart for racial paternalism. Cenac, who for a while was the only black writer on "The Daily Show," told "WTF"; podcaster Marc Maron that he once complained to Stewart about what he felt was the host's racially insensitive imitation of Herman Cain, and that Stewart got defensive, chewed out Cenac in front of the rest of the staff in a profane rant, and drove the writer to tears. Yeah, that's pretty uncool, both the part about what Cenac called the "Amos & Andy" voice Stewart used to speak as Cain (by the way, Apatow's imitation of Cosby was pretty creepy, too, for the same minstrel-y reason) and the part about humiliating Cenac in front of his peers. Then again, Stewart's made a lot of edgy jokes over the years, and some have landed with thuds. And comedy hosts have been cursing out their writers in front of each other since the dawn of television. Stewart's alleged misdeeds are, unfortunately, not atypical for the medium. Hey, maybe Comedy Central should take him off the air. Oh, wait... never mind.

13.#AprilLives and #AprilDies. Vote if you like on whether or not Tara Reid should be crushed by falling space shuttle debris, but it won't matter; they'll still make "Sharknado 4: Even More Product Placement," no matter what we do.

14.Candace Cameron Bure and Paula Faris may be the next "View" co-hosts. For those of you still keeping score, that would make two former child stars (Bure and Raven-Symone), two comedians (Whoopi Goldberg and recent hire Michelle Collins) and one "GMA Weekend" newswoman (Faris). This is apparently "The View's" idea of diversity. But they could hire Tara Reid, and it still wouldn't matter. Stick a fork in this show, it's done.

15. Ted Cruz's opinions on "Star Trek." The presidential candidate may have stepped in it with the geek constituency with his comments to the New York Times that, when it comes to U.S.S. Enterprise captains, he prefers Kirk to Picard because he believes man-of-action Kirk would have been a Republican, while man-of-contemplation Picard would have been a Democrat. This is yet another reason, going all the way back to Dan Quayle and "Murphy Brown," why politicians shouldn't talk about TV or pop culture. Even Kirk himself, William Shatner, felt compelled to weigh in, insisting that it's foolish to attribute 21st-century partisanship to futuristic characters, since "Star Trek" "wasn't political." Not sure why we should care what Cruz thinks about "Star Trek" anyway, since it has nothing to do with his positions on real-life issues -- unless he plans to solve America's dependence on fossil fuels by acquiring dilithium crystals. By the way, not sure why we should value Shatner's opinion either. If he truly thinks that the highly allegorical "Star Trek" isn't political, he's either being disingenuous or didn't pay much attention to his own scripts.

16.Hulu's proposed ad-free premium subscription tier. Guess they finally recognized that no one likes their shows interrupted by ads you can't skip. Why, it's almost like they've been reading my column. Now, for $12 to $14 a month, I'll be able to watch "Seinfeld" straight through instead of with my finger on the fast-forward button, the way I watch it on TV. In fact, this is the signpost toward a cord-cutter's paradise. Eventually, I won't need a TV anymore. Sure, I'll have to download hundreds of apps to my iPad, one for Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and each traditional TV channel I want to watch. And I'll have to pay premium prices a la carte for so many of them that the total cost may surpass that of the bundled channels on my cable bill. Which I'll still have to pay so I can stream the shows on WiFi. But I won't have to watch commercials I can't skip, so it'll all be worth it, right?
]]>2015-07-24T11:30:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/07/24/things-on-tv-i-cant-care-about/21211603
The debut of Syfy's "Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!" on July 22 is cause for celebration, just for the title alone. But the fact that the "Sharknado" movies have become annual events shouldn't make us forget that SyFy cranks out similar monster-movie fare at the rate of about 24 films per year.

That's an awful lot of sharks, mad scientists, unholy creature hybrids, endangered bikini girls, sharks, '80s pop-stars and other pop-culture-relic actors, sharks, and prehistoric predators awakened from their slumbers and looking for breakfast. Did we mention sharks? You have to admire the creativity the filmmakers draw upon to come up with new monsters, new monster-on-monster battles, and new ways to kill characters and wreak mayhem, all despite tiny budgets that don't allow for lavish production values, quality costumes and special effects, or awards-caliber acting.

With all that cheesy deliciousness oozing forth from the channel every other Saturday night for the last 14 years or so, it's hard to tell the good movies from the so-bad-they're-good. Here's a list that should help. When we get that zombie western starring members of the Backstreet Boys and 'N Sync, we may have to revise it, but whichever end of the list it winds up on, it'll have big footprints to fill. Or rather, Bigfoot prints. ]]>2015-07-21T17:00:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/07/21/5-best-and-5-worst-syfy-movies/21211178Who won the box office this week? Depends on how you look at it.

We treat the box office like a horse race every weekend, as if the new and old movies were all competing on the same playing field. But the truth is, on any given weekend, every new release is more like a stock IPO, each with its own unique background and set of expectations. They all just happen to be launching at the same time.

So you could view the weekly winner, not necessarily as the movie that sold the most tickets, but the movie that did the best on its own terms. Here's a look at the movies that made the biggest splash at the ticket counter this weekend, depending on which measure you use.

"Ant-Man": Yes, "Ant-Man" sold the most tickets in absolute numbers, an estimated $58.0 million worth. But considering how high Marvel has set the bar for its films' opening weekends, is that really a good number? It's their lowest opening weekend since 2008's "The Incredible Hulk."

Given that most pundits projected a weekend premiere of about $60 million, "Ant-Man" opened a little below expectations. Then again, the tiny hero is a fairly obscure Marvel character, so you can argue that the movie was lucky to do as well as it did, proving (as did "Guardians of the Galaxy" last summer), that, no matter how unfamiliar the superhero, the Marvel brand name alone is enough to conjure up a No. 1 box office debut.

"Minions": At an estimated $50.2 million, the cartoon did almost as well on its second weekend as "Ant-Man" did on its first.

In 10 days, it has zoomed past $200 million (to $216.7 million) and surpassed by nearly 10 percent the take of predecessor "Despicable Me 2" over its first 10 days ($197.9 million). But then, that film opened on a Wednesday, so its first 10 days included just one full weekend. Also, "Minions" had a sharper drop in its second weekend (57 percent) than pundits predicted. (Some thought it would hold on to enough of last weekend's business to defeat "Ant-Man.") That steep drop-off doesn't bode well for the film's prospects of out-earning "Despicable Me 2," which grossed $368.1 million."Trainwreck": The R-rated comedy's estimated $30.2 million debut, good for third place, is a vindication for first-time movie star/co-screenwriter Amy Schumer, for producer/director Judd Apatow, for the marketers at Universal, and for R-rated comedies targeted toward women.

Despite the growing popularity of the Comedy Central-bred comic actress, the movie was expected to be a tough sell, at least to men. (Indeed, only 34 percent of the audience were guys.) It probably helped that Universal's ads emphasized Apatow's role ("from the guy who brought you 'Bridesmaids,'" said the ads, even though Apatow merely produced that film), or that the filmmakers stocked the cast with LeBron James and other guy-appeal sports stars. But it also suggests that Schumer's humor has more appeal to men than experts thought.

After all, some pundits predicted the movie would open only in the high teens or mid-20s. In fact, the movie opened on a par with Apatow's biggest opener yet, "Knocked Up" ($30.7 million), and higher than all the other movies he's directed.

"Jurassic World": It's in fifth place this weekend, with an estimated $11.4 million. But its total to date is $611.2 million, making it only the fourth movie in history to cross $600 million in North America. And it did it in only six weeks.

"Irrational Man": The new Woody Allen movie opened on just five screens and earned just $188,000. But that's an average of $37,600 per screen, the highest per-theater average of any movie currently playing.

That doesn't mean "irrational Man" would have done "Ant-Man" sized numbers if it had opened on thousands of screens, but it does bode well for the movie once it expands onto a few dozen, then a few hundred screens as the summer progresses. Meantime, it's earned solid bragging rights."Mr. Holmes": The revisionist take on Sherlock Holmes, with Ian McKellen playing the sleuth as a very old man who's losing his memory, opened on just 363 screens, but it took in an estimated $2.5 million, enough to crack the Top 10 in tenth place. It averaged $6,857 per screen. All those numbers are very good for an independent movie, especially one with a 76-year-old leading man.

It wasn't all rosy news at the box office. In their third weekends, "Terminator Genisys" and "Magic Mike XXL" both continued to languish. So did four-week-old "Ted 2."

The lessons? Not every franchise reboot is a guaranteed success, there may not be room in the marketplace for more than one or two films whose primary audience is women, and there are some movies that not even the Universal marketers can sell. Overalll, the box office was down 10 percent from last weekend, which is understandable, given how huge "Minions" was when it debuted with $115.7 million a week ago.

The stand-up comic, whose sitcom "The Jim Gaffigan Show" debuted on TV Land this week, has been promoting the show with interviews (including here, here, and here) where he explains why he took his new series to basic cable.

According to Gaffigan, each broadcast network tried to shoehorn his autobiographical series into its preferred sitcom format, with less of an eye on what would make the show unique or good and more on what would make it test well with audiences and run long enough to be sold into syndication. That's where the real money is for a TV production company -- we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars for a successful series with at least 100 episodes in its library -- but to get there, the networks apparently believe that risk-avoidance is more important than preserving the idiosyncratic, personal voice that led them to pick up the show in the first place.

In this case, that voice belongs to Gaffigan and his wife Jeannie, who has co-written his stand-up material and who serves as a writer and co-producer with her husband on the TV Land show. Initially, she'd have played herself, too, but the couple eventually decided it was better to have Jeannie focus her efforts behind the scenes, so Jim's on-screen Jeannie is played by Ashley Williams. Both Gaffigans say they feel the show is true to their life experience -- a showbiz couple raising a Catholic family of five kids in a cramped apartment in downtown Manhattan.

It's not even like the usual complaint about network sitcoms applies to the Gaffigans' development woes. After all, Gaffigan prefers to work clean -- not out of any moral conviction, but because it suits his material, which is largely about snack food and babies. That doesnt mean his material doesn't border on the risque; Jim's penis is the source of running gags in two early episodes, though nothing is shown.

Still, even that wasn't raunchy enough for CBS, which has had great success in recent years with "Two and a Half Men" (and other sexually frank Chuck Lorre shows) and "2 Broke Girls." According to Gaffigan, they actually wanted to make his show more vulgar and crass.

Over at NBC, the Gaffigans say, the executives wanted each script's plot to follow a pattern, beginning with an "inciting event," followed by a complication that raises the stakes. These are the sort of tactics writers use to make audiences worry about the characters, so that they'll be more relatable and more likable. (Remember, this is the network that brought you "Seinfeld," "The Office," and "30 Rock," long-running shows about groups of generally unlikable people, with plots based more on the characters' inability to cope with the world than their tendency to rise to the occasion when faced with obstacles.)

Many of the networks' objections to the show as the Gaffigans conceived it seemed to have less to do with subject matter, plotting, and character than they did with formal issues. Save for the pilot, the episodes start with sped-up montages of Jim and Jeannie interacting with their kids. (There's your raised stakes.) The show is shot on location in Manhattan, which is costly but lends the show an air of realism that makes the series' visuals look more like those of "Louie" than any current network sitcom. And it's shot single-camera, like "The Office," "30 Rock," or ABC's "Modern Family." (The comedian says CBS initially agreed to the single-camera format, then reversed itself and insisted on a multi-camera, studio-bound setup of the sort that CBS has been using since "I Love Lucy.")

None of this is especially innovative or cutting-edge. In the pilot that aired on TV Land this week and the "Super Fun Daddy Day" episode that previewed on Amazon before that, there was little in the way of plot or character to distinguish "The Jim Gaffigan Show" from the wave of shlubby-guy-hot-wife shows that were CBS' bread and butter a decade ago ("Everybody Loves Raymond," "The King of Queens," "Yes, Dear," "Still Standing," and others that have worked for CBS going all the way back to "The Honeymooners" 60 years ago). What's unique about the series is its voice, which includes its visuals (New York is really another character), its rhythms, its obsession with food, its matter-of-fact portrayal of the family's Catholicism, and its satiric take on the vast gap between the parents' idealism and dreams and their shortcomings and dashed hopes.

That sensibility, more than anything else, is what makes "The Jim Gaffigan Show" seem fresh and current. As he told the Daily Beast, "We're in this golden age of dramas, and with that and reality TV, the cadence of sitcoms seems inauthentic. So there's time for a single-camera show that's humorous, but based in reality."

It's that sensibility that TV Land offered to preserve, the Gaffigans suggest. The executives there were much less particular; they just wanted 10 good episodes. If those draw viewers, then they can make more. If not, TV Land got the presitge of having Jim Gaffigan do a show, and the Gaffigans got to make the series they wanted to make.

Why was TV Land so different? The Gaffigans don't say, but here are some possible reasons. As a basic cable channel, it doesn't need to worry about network-sized ratings or syndication sales to make money, so the bar for success is lower, and so are the stakes for any one series (there's that word again). TV Land chief Doug Herzog also oversees Comedy Central, where "Gaffigan" reruns will air almost immediately (giving the executive essentially a two-for-the-price-of-one deal), and where buzzworthy hits from "South Park" to "Inside Amy Schumer" have been built around the personal voices of original comedy minds, not cookie-cutter formulas.

The networks have tried to make use of original comic voices before. Two decades ago, after the successes of "Roseanne," "Home Improvement," and "Seinfeld," the networks binged on shows built around stand-up comics -- but they made the shows all look and sound the same, with the stars playing overwhelmed parents or overwhelmed workplace drones. Gaffigan was part of that wave; his CBS show "Welcome to New York" was a workplace comedy built around him but largely taken out of his creative hands. It was canceled after 13 episodes. In the years since, he's become a hugely successful touring comic, to the point where TV needs him more than he needs TV. He was in a position this time to hold out until he got to make the show that he wanted, a waiting process that, as it turned out, lasted several years.

So the networks' loss here is basic cable's gain. And Jim and Jeannie Gaffigan's experience here is probably typical. After all, Tina Fey, after a decade and a half with NBC, first took "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt" there; they passed, and now it's an Emmy-nominated hit on Netflix. Like basic cable, the streaming sites would rather have buzz than syndication sales (at least, for now), which is why they've been only too happy to pick up sitcoms the networks have canceled for being too idiosyncratic and original, like "Arrested Development," "Community," and "The Mindy Project."

The networks' reliance on formula for sitcoms is not only driving potential hits and shows they couldn't capitalize on toward other platforms, it's also driving creators away. (Gaffigan says he'll never work for a network again.) Will there come a time when broadcasters drive away their last remaining laugh-craving viewers, too?
]]>2015-07-17T12:30:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/07/17/is-the-network-tv-sitcom-dying/21210219 Give the Emmys credit for at least trying to keep up with the current explosion of quality television.

This year, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences expanded the Best Comedy and Drama Series categories to seven slots each, and they made other minor changes (online voting!) meant to bring the awards into the 21st century. Still, there's more good TV now than even the Academy can keep up with, so the outrage and shock over the snubs and surprises in this morning's Emmy nominations is inevitable. Here are some of the most astonishing omissions and inclusions.

BEST DRAMA SERIES
The biggest shocker here is the snub of "Empire," the season's breakout hit. Was it too soapy or guilty-pleasure-ish for the Academy to take seriously? Fellow newbie/Twitter sensation "How to Get Away With Murder" was also snubbed. Golden Globe fave "The Affair" got no love, here or in other major categories. The voters' usual lack of enthusiasm for genre fare meant "The Walking Dead" was overlooked again. And the Emmys blew their last chances to recognize "Sons of Anarchy" (a show they snubbed throughout its existence) and "Justified."

The Academy decided "Orange Is the New Black" is a drama, not a comedy, so its inclusion among this year's nominees is a novelty but not a surprise. Neither are nominations for frequent winner "Mad Men," frequent nominees "Game of Thrones" and "Homeland," "Downton Abbey" (nominated every year it's been on), and "House of Cards" (ditto). Many pundits expected a vote for Netflix's new "Bloodline" (honored this year in other major categories), but it didn't get in. The lone new series to make the cut this year was "Better Call Saul," perhaps taking over the slot its predecessor, "Breaking Bad," owned for years.

BEST COMEDY SERIES
There weren't many surprises this year, with five-time winner "Modern Family," frequent nominee "Louie," and "Veep" (nominated every year it's been on) taking their usual slots. It's nice to see "Parks and Recreation" get a final salute. Other pleasant surprises: nominations for "Silicon Valley" and Netflix newbie "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt." Also new, but not surprising: Amazon's Golden Globe-winning and timely "Transparent."

BEST MOVIE MADE FOR TELEVISION
This was a wretched year for TV movies. So wretched that LIfetime's "Grace of Monaco" got in. (At least "Whitney" didn't.) So did "Hello Ladies: The Movie," "Nightingale," and "Bessie," though given HBO's perpetual domination of this category, those aren't surprises. Also expected: Acorn's "Agatha Christie's Poirot: Curtains, Poirot's Last Case" and National Geographic's "Killing Jesus." Again, a weak year.

BEST ACTOR, DRAMA
As with "Empire" in the Drama Series category, star Terrence Howard was robbed. Also, no love for Dominic West ("The Affair"), Clive Owen ("The Knick"), or Emmy fave James Spader ("The Blacklist.") But Liev Schreiber surprised the pundits by getting a nod for "Ray Donovan." He's good, but given the way Jon Voight steals the show, few predicted the voters would notice Schreiber.

Kyle Chandler's nomination for new series "Bloodline" was expected, and so was Bob Odenkirk's nomination for new show "Better Call Saul," though it's a surprise considering that he made his name as a comic actor. Newsroom" star Jeff Daniels seems to have snuck in based on the Academy's reflexive love for Aaron Sorkin and HBO. Kevin Spacey ("House of Cards") has been nominated for all three of his show's seasons, and Jon Hamm has now been nominated all eight years he's been eligible for "Mad Men." Maybe this year he'll finally win.

BEST ACTRESS, DRAMA
There would have been blood in the streets if Taraji P. Henson ("Empire") and Viola Davis ("How to Get Away With Murder") didn't get nominated. And you can't argue with perennial nominees Claire Danes ("Homeland"), Elisabeth Moss ("Mad Men"), and Robin Wright ("House of Cards"). But that meant a lot of deserving actresses didn't make the cut, including Julianna Margulies ("The Good Wife"), Caitriona Balfe ("Outlander"), Lizzy Caplan ("Masters of Sex"), Michelle Dockery ("Downton Abbey"), Ruth Wilson ("The Affair"), Keri Russell ("The Americans"), and Taylor Schilling ("Orange Is the New Black").

One who did, shockingly, is Tatiana Maslany of "Orphan Black." Given the Emmys' usual distaste for genre fare and their past snubbing of Maslany's incredible performance in multiple roles on this show, everyone expected her to get ignored again -- and everyone is gobsmacked (but happily so) that she wasn't.

BEST ACTOR, COMEDY
"Big Bang Theory" star Jim Parsons has been nominated six times and won four, but this year, the Academy finally snubbed Sheldon. That's the biggest shocker in the category. Also somewhat surprising: nods for Anthony Anderson and Will Forte from new shows "Black-ish" and "The Last Man on Earth." Some experts expected a sentimental vote for "The Comedians" star Billy Crystal, but it didn't happen.

"Silicon Valley" star Thomas Middleditch got a nod for the first time, but that was expected. So were nominations for perennial favorites Don Cheadle ("House of Lies"), Matt LeBlanc ("Episodes"), and William H. Macy ("Shameless"), though maybe it's a surprise that Showtime now dominates this category. Least surprising was a nomination for "Transparent" star Jeffrey Tambor, who'll probably repeat his Golden Globes win.

BEST ACTRESS, COMEDY
The happiest surprise is the inclusion of Amy Schumer; sure, she's been absolutely on fire this year on "Inside Amy Schumer," but Emmy voters rarely recognize sketch comedy. Also a happy surprise: the inclusion of Lisa Kudrow in the uncompromisingly dark comedy "The Comeback." For Netflix's new "Grace and Frankie," Lily Tomlin won her first-ever nomination as a comedy lead, though her co-lead Jane Fonda got snubbed.

The rest of the slots went to frequent nominees. Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who's won for all three previous seasons of "Veep" has another shot this year. Probably bad news for Edie Falco, nominated for the seventh and last time for "Nurse Jackie," and for Amy Poehler of fellow defunct comedy "Parks and Recreation." Bad news also for the many worthy comic actresses who were snubbed: Golden Globe winner Gina Rodriguez ("Jane the Virgin"), Tracee Ellis Ross ("Black-ish"), Constance Wu ("Fresh Off the Boat"), Ellie Kemper ("Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt"), past Emmy darling Lena Dunham ("Girls"), and Melissa McCarthy ("Mike & Molly").

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR, DRAMA
There were some surprising names on the list: Michael Kelly ("House of Cards"), Jim Carter ("Downton Abbey") and Alan Cumming ("The Good Wife"). They took slots that might otherwise have gone to Mandy Patinkin ("Homeland"), Jon Voight ("Ray Donovan"), Jussie Smollett ("Empire"), and John Slattery ("Mad Men.")

Less surprising: nominations for Peter Dinklage ("Game of Thrones") and Jonathan Banks ("Better Call Saul"). The nod for Ben Mendelsohn ("Bloodline") is a surprise only if you haven't watched the new Netflix series.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS, DRAMA
This was the most predictable category. Christine Baranski got her sixth straight nod for "The Good Wife," as did Christina Hendricks for "Mad Men." Last year's winner Uzo Aduba ("Orange Is the New Black") is up for a repeat. Repeat nominees Joanne Froggatt ("Downton Abbey") and Lena Headey and Emilia Clarke ("Game of Thrones") are back again. Alas, that meant no room for Aduba's co-star Kate Mulgrew or Froggatt's co-star Maggie Smith.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR, COMEDY
In a happy surprise, given the Academy's avoidance of sketch comedy, Keegan-Michael Key made the list; still, how come he was nominated while "Key & Peele" co-star Jordan Peele was snubbed? Another happy surprise: newcomer Tituss Burgess, nominated for "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt." Raise a glass of pinot noir!

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS, COMEDY
Two big surprises in this category: First, that there were so many worthy candidates that vote-splitting led to eight nominees. Second, that one of them was Niecy Nash of HBO's otherwise ignored "Getting On." The voters also managed to find room for Allison Janney (who won last year for "Mom"), Julie Bowen (who's won twice for "Modern Family"), Anna Chlumsky (who had a breakout year on "Veep"), Kate McKinnon (still the standout performer among the current "Saturday Night Live" cast), Jane Krakowski ("Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt"), Mayim Bialik (the lone major nomination for "The Big Bang Theory"), and Gaby Hoffman (that's how much the Emmys love "Transparent").

Hard to quibble with any of these, though some expected Hoffman's castmates Judith Light or Amy Landecker to be recognized. "Modern Family"'s Sofia Vergara is absent. You could argue for "Kimmy Schmidt"'s Carol Kane over Krakowski. And the Emmys missed their last chance to honor Merritt Wever for "Nurse Jackie" (though she did win two years ago), Jane Lynch for "Glee," and Betty White for "Hot in Cleveland." But otherwise, it's hard to muster up the usual outrage here, as in other Emmy categories this year.
]]>2015-07-16T15:00:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/07/16/2015-emmy-nominations-snubs-and-surprises/21206420Judd Apatow is such an ubiquitous figure in comedy -- as a producer, director, and writer -- that it's hard to believe he's actually not associated with certain films. He had nothing to do with "I Love You, Man" or "This Is the End," even though those films star actors from his comic stable and center on the bromantic relationships that have become his trademark.

His new film "Trainwreck," opening July 17, marks a departure for Apatow; it's the first movie he's directed that he didn't write (Amy Schumer stars in, and also cowrote, the romantic comedy). In honor of his new movie, we've ranked and filed 19 Apatow films -- those he either wrote and directed or produced -- that you need to see. ]]>2015-07-16T09:00:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/07/16/judd-apatow-movies-ranked/21208879
If "Wedding Crashers" had been a real wedding, we'd owe it a gift of tin or aluminum now, since those are the traditional 10th anniversary presents.

When the raunchy romantic comedy came out 10 years ago this week (on July 15, 2005), it proved a career highlight for stars Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, while pushing the careers of Isla Fisher and Bradley Cooper to the next level. In the decade since, some of the movie's stars have flourished while others have had a more tumultuous ride. Here's what's happened to the whole "Wedding" party since the last slice of cake went into the freezer. ]]>2015-07-15T13:15:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/07/15/wedding-crashers-where-are-they-now/21208341From rampaging dinosaurs to yellow henchman, Universal Pictures can't be stopped.

With "Minions" scoring a $115.2 million opening weekend -- the second highest for an animated film, behind 2007's "Shrek the Third" with $121.6 million -- it's not just another hit for Universal this summer, but for the industry in general.

The overall take is keeping up with 2013, the best year to date. It's also part of a stellar year for Universal, which boasted this week that it's reached the $3 billion mark overseas in record time, thanks largely to such hits as "Minions," "Jurassic World," "Pitch Perfect 2," "Furious 7," and "Fifty Shades of Grey."

But the big box office of these movies points to a larger issue. All of them, save "Fifty Shades," are spinoffs, sequels, and/or reboots of previously successful films. (And "Fifty Shades," of course, is based on a huge bestseller.) If Universal had a great first six months of the year, it's only because it's managed to execute better than the other studios that strategy of focusing on blockbusters based on familiar brand-name properties.

So far, Universal has released 10 movies this year. Most of the success comes from the five movies mentioned above. Out of the studio's $4.6 billion take worldwide from 2015 releases, $4.2 billion, or 92 percent, comes from those five movies. Just $350.1 million comes from the remaining films.What are those other five? There's "Blackhat," a $70 milllion Michael Mann thriller that flopped in January with just $17.3 million worldwide. "The Boy Next Door," the Jennifer Lopez thriller that reportedly cost just $4 million to make but grossed $50.2 million worldwide -- a modest success. There's "Unfriended," a horror film from producer Jason Blum's cheap-scare factory (much like this weekend's "The Gallows"), which cost just $1 million to make but returned $46.7 million worldwide -- making cheap horror the only genre besides franchise entries that offer a huge return on investment (as a percentage, but not in absolute dollars).

And then there was "Seventh Son," a $95-million attempt to launch a young-adult fantasy franchise that bombed big. It earned back just $110.6 million worldwide, which means the movie lost money (once you add in distribution and marketing costs). Finally, there's "Ted 2," with a reported budget between $68 and $85 million. So far, it's made $124.8 million in three weeks, about 22 percent less than the first "Ted" made at the same point in its run. Given its higher budget ("Ted" cost $50 million), the talking-bear sequel has to be considered a stiff disappointment.

So that's two costly franchise failures -- plus one bargain-priced horror hit, one similarly cheap original thriller hit, and one expensive original thriller flop -- against five overwhelmingly successful franchise installments. From a strict accounting standpoint, it's hard to argue against that strategy.

Even the two expensive franchise flops were good gambles (well, at least one of them was; which studio wouldn't have greenlit "Ted 2"?) whose losses were more than offset by the hits.

And the other studios are behaving largely the same way. Disney is now little more than Marvel, Pixar, "Star Wars," and live-action remakes of its cartoon hits. It's one big gamble on an original premise this year, "Tomorrowland," didn't pay off.Highlights of Paramount's slate so far this year include the "SpongeBob" sequel and "Terminator Genisys," still struggling in its second week but also the studio's second-highest grossing film of the year so far. Coming later this month is the studio's fifth "Mission: Impossible" film.

Fox's big hits so far this year have been franchise launchers "Home" and "KIngsman: The Secret Service," along with Melissa McCarthy comedy "Spy" and action sequel "Taken 3." Coming soon are "Fantastic Four" (reboot of a franchise that's only a decade old), "Hitman: Agent 47" (a reboot of a fairly recent video game-inspired film), a "Maze Runner" sequel, a "Frankenstein" movie, and the latest animated films from the "Peanuts" gang and Alvin and the Chipmunks.

Sony has barely made a ripple this year; it's biggest hits have been the "Paul Blart" sequel and the Kevin Hart comedy "The Wedding Ringer." Its big original movies -- Hugh Jackman sci-fi tale "Chappie" and Cameron Crowe romance "Aloha" -- went nowhere. Its upcoming films include two Adam Sandler projects ("Pixels" and animated sequel "Hotel Transylvania 2") and the launch of a franchise based on the "Goosebumps" kiddie-horror books.Warner Bros., typically the most franchise-minded studio, gave us new installments of "Mad Max" and "Magic Mike," as well as the big-screen version of "Entourage." "Mad Max: Fury Road" aside, however, none of these movies performed as well as the studio's non-franchise films, including: Oscar-nominated war drama "American Sniper," Dwayne Johnson action film "San Andreas," and Will Ferrell-Kevin Hart comedy "Get Hard."

Another attempt at launching a franchise, the Wachowskis' "Jupiter Ascending," was a planet-sized flop. Due by the end of the year, the relaunch of the "Vacation" franchise after 18 years, the big-screen version of 1960s TV spy series "The Man From U.N.C.L.E.," and a remake of 1991's action thriller "Point Break."

Even though Warners' seems to have done better this year with non-franchise movies than with reboots and sequels, don't expect its strategy to change -- and don't expect the others to change either.

Yes, horror movies, comedies, and mid-budget dramas and thrillers are a lot cheaper to make than big action spectacles, but every studio would rather have the next "Jurassic World" than the next "Unfriended" because the rewards are so much greater.

Hollywood still has to take the occasional risk on originality -- after all, "Minions" is the stepchild of "Despicable Me," a thoroughly original animated feature. But originality seems like little more than a means to an end: a repeatable success. The result may make critics despair and doesn't always please moviegoers either, but it makes studio executives and accountants rub their hands together with glee like Gru or Scarlett Overkill.

By the way, "Despicable Me 3" is coming in 2017.
]]>2015-07-13T09:00:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/07/13/from-jurassic-world-to-minions-why-universal-owns-the-box-o/21207581Looks like Eric Cartman will be an incorrigible prepubescent child for at least four more years.

And if you want to watch his juvenile antics on "South Park," either on TV or online, you'll have to put up with commercials.

The extension of "South Park" creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone's contract with Comedy Central through 2019 is good news for "South Park" fans, as it adds three more seasons to the 20 that both the show's creators and the network already agreed to. (Season 19 begins on September 16.) At the same time, Parker and Stone have extended their deal with Hulu, so that the streaming site will continue to be the exclusive online home of both new episodes and the full "South Park" library.

Cost to Hulu of this contract extension: a cool $192 million.

Mind you, this is on top of the $160 to $180 million the website spent two months ago to acquire the entire "Seinfeld" catalogue. At the time, Hulu let it be known that the company had a $750 million war chest to spend on the kind of premium content that would at last make them competitive with the much more popular Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Which means they've now spent half their money on just two shows. One of them consists of 20-year-old reruns that you can watch any night of the week on cable. The other is a show that's also in frequent reruns on cable, a show that is still a creative force but, arguably, is past its peak. Oh, and Hulu also bought all 300 episodes of "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" from CBS for an undisclosed sum. Way to grab those young viewers, Hulu.

As this column has noted, Hulu does have other shows in the works, original and exclusive shows like the ones on Netflix and Amazon Prime, series that have proven TV talents behind them. Later this year, programs like "11/22/63" (the time-travel drama developed by J.J. Abrams from a Stephen King novel and starring James Franco) and Amy Poehler's "Difficult People" (starring rising comics Billy Eichner and Julie Klausner) will try to become Hulu's versions of "House of Cards" and "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt." Plus, Hulu will be the only place to see the new season of "The Mindy Project," having scooped up the Mindy Kaling sitcom after Fox canceled it.

Also in the mix: streaming rights to the recent Fox hit drama "Empire" and the likely soon-to-be-a-hit "Walking Dead" spinoff, AMC's "Fear the Walking Dead."

But Hulu still faces two major hurdles. One is its subscriber base, currently around 9 million people. That's 50 percent more than it had a year ago, but still only about a fourth of the number of viewers Netflix or Amazon Prime have in the United States. Hulu has said it will promote its new shows by raising its marketing budget by 70 percent, but it still has to reach potential viewers beyond its base, and it has to convince them to make that psychological leap toward paying another $8 per month to see a selection of familiar shows and a handful of series no one has seen yet.

And that's where the other hurdle lies, since subscribing to Hulu means being willing to endure commercial interruptions during your streams. Ads that break up your viewing experience make Hulu different from Amazon Prime and Netflix and more like... well, the standard network and basic cable TV viewing experience that the streaming medium is trying to distance itself from. At least if you have a DVR, you can zip past the ads on TV, but of course, you can't do that on Hulu.

From a business standpoint, the ads make sense. With a smaller subscriber base, someone has to pay the bills. And if, as anticipated, the dollars spent on digital advertising surpass those spent on TV commercials sometime in the next two years, Hulu will be in a better position than Netflix or Amazon to take advantage of that revenue stream.

But viewers don't like having to watch ads that they can't skip. Besides, sponsors tend to influence content. Most don't like fare that's too edgy or controversial; it doesn't create a congenial environment in which to sell cars or cat food. They'll make an exception, however, if the daring fare draws affluent viewers who buy big-ticket items.

And that seems to be Hulu's gamble: that their small subscriber base will either grow or be affluent enough to attract lucrative sponsors who'll overlook risky content in order to reach the right eyeballs. And the company is also gambling that those eyeballs won't blink -- or click away -- if they're forced to watch ads.

At least Matt Stone is happy. The "South Park" co-creator, who has a long history of fighting to get online outlets to pay him and Trey Parker what their show is worth, told the Hollywood Reporter he felt vindicated by the deal. "There's finally an understanding that the business is going to have to rely on the talent community and the franchises that it has built and not on algorithms," Stone said. "I don't like our stuff being talked about as content," he added. "We don't make content. We make television. And that's now what digital understands it has to pay for."

Well, somebody has to pay for it, either the viewers or the sponsors. Hulu's bet is that it can get both to cough up.
]]>2015-07-10T12:00:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/07/10/can-south-park-make-hulu-a-player/21205765
Horror filmmakers have a special fondness for shedding teenage blood.

After all, teens are horror's primary audience, so it's especially frightening -- and cathartic -- to see teens like themselves targeted by deadly evil, often just for behaving like normal adolescents. In the last four decades, movies about teens targeted by slashers have become the mainstay of movie horror.

With "The Gallows" hitting theaters this Friday -- a teen horror movie with echoes of "Carrie," "Prom Night," "I Know What You Did Last Summer," and more -- it's worth looking back at some of the most celebrated teen horror movies of all time. Just remember, don't separate from the group, and don't have sex. ]]>2015-07-07T16:00:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/07/07/best-teen-horror-movies-ranked/21204602
Not long ago, voice actors in animated features were as unknown as they were unseen.

The pay wasn't great, but there was a group of vocal pros (from Mel Blanc to, more recently, Frank Welker) who could play every part. But over the last quarter-century or so, thanks to the animation renaissance brought about by Disney and Pixar, animated features have gained prestige, and the anonymous voice pros have largely been pushed aside by A-list actors you'd never have imagined would do cartoons.

Case in point: Sandra Bullock and Jon Hamm in the new "Minions," opening July 10. Here are 13 more stars who've defied expectations and made the medium of animation their own. ]]>2015-07-06T15:00:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/07/06/memorable-hollywood-voices-animated-movies/21205134You know it's a bad day in Hollywood when "Magic Mike XXL" can't get a rise out of the box office.

The male-stripper sequel was expected to earn in the low $30 million range over the three-day holiday weekend, and hit somewhere around $45M for the five days since its debut on Wednesday. Instead, it opened in fourth place with an estimated Friday-to-Sunday haul of $12 million and $27.1 million for its first five days of release. That's nearly 45 percent below the $49.6 million the original "Magic Mike" earned in its first five days in 2012. Ouch.

Another sequel, "Terminator Genisys," also underperformed this weekend. The fifth film in the franchise opened in third with an estimated $28.7 million for the three-day weekend, and $44.2 million since its Wednesday debut. But at least those numbers were at the low end of what pundits had predicted. "Magic Mike XXL" wasn't even in the ballpark.

Why did Channing Tatum and his team of male entertainers drop so fast and so far? Here are six likely reasons:

1. Channing Tatum Can Be Hit or MissIs C. Tates a box office draw? Sure. A consistent one, though? Not so much.

Outside of "The Vow," the first two "Jump Street" films and "Magic Mike," Tatum seems unable to attract the level of box office that other A-Listers can. (We're looking at you, "Jupiter Ascending.") "XXL" was sold largely on his shoulders (and pecs and abs) alone, and they don't seem muscular enough.

2. The Female Appeal

That's been the big box office story all year, starting with "Fifty Shades of Grey" and "Cinderella." Indeed, exit polls show that 96 percent of "XXL's " audience were women. But it seems you have to have at least some men buying tickets to generate a hit, and "Magic Mike" had hardly any.

3. Needs More Than Just Good Word-of-mouth

"Magic Mike XXL" earned a very good A- CinemaScore, suggesting that viewers would give the film strong recommendations to friends. But the film's older audience relies on more than just word-of-mouth recommendations. These ticketbuyers still read reviews, and reviews for the sequel were decidedly mixed.

4. That Big Drop Over the WeekendWednesday's opening day triumph ($9.3 million) seemed to indicate that fans of the first "Mike" were really eager to see the sequel. Unfortunately, as with many franchise movies and genre films (especially horror), the die-hard fans are the only ones who feel compelled to see the film on opening day. And a troublesome 60 percent slide from Friday-to-Saturday all but underlines that point.

5. July 4th Competition

Usually, Independence Day is a good weekend to open a movie; just ask Will Smith. But this year, July 4 fell on Saturday, so fireworks and barbecues cut into the heart of the moviegoing weekend. Plus, competition was especially stiff, not just from fellow newcomer "Genisys," but also from unstoppable holdovers "Jurassic World" and "Inside Out." The two box office hits nearly tied for first, even though they've already been in theaters for four weeks and three weeks, respectively.

But there is a silver lining (ish) here. Thanks to hits like "Jurassic World," "Inside Out," and "Avengers: Age of Ultron," this summer is running about 13 percent ahead of 2014, and only five percent behind 2013. But are these films, and December's "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," enough to carry a whole year?

They'd better be, if the rest of 2015 turns out to be filled with miscalculations like "Magic Mike XXL." ]]>2015-07-06T10:30:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/07/06/magic-mike-xxl-box-office-bomb/21203377Since its release 30 years ago this week (on July 3, 1985), "Back to the Future" has been everyone's favorite time-travel movie. It's remained a must-see long enough for Marty McFly's own kids to enjoy it.

Even so, there's much you may not know about the beloved sci-fi comedy, from the unused ideas that popped up in other films, to why there has yet to (thankfully) be a reboot. To celebrate the film's 30th anniversary, we're firing up the flux capacitor and traveling back 30 years to learn the secrets of "Back to the Future."1. Director Robert Zemeckis and co-screenwriter Bob Gale (pictured above) tried for years to create a time-travel story. The key came in 1980, when Gale was looking over his father's high school yearbook and wondered whether he and his father would have been friends if they'd both been teenagers at the same time.

2. Zemeckis and Gale took their idea to Steven Spielberg, who'd already made three movies with them ("I Wanna Hold Your Hand," "1941," and "Used Cars"). Spielberg liked the idea, but the pair held off, fearing that they'd get a reputation in Hollywood as filmmakers who only got work because of their relationship with Spielberg.

3. According to Gale, the pair pitched the script 40 times without success. Disney rejected the idea as too Oedipal. Columbia, on the other hand, felt the film wasn't sexy enough. (This was the era of "Porky's" and the teen sex comedy.) Only after Zemeckis had a hit on his own, his 1984 work-for-hire "Romancing the Stone," did the director have the clout to get "Back to the Future" made -- at Universal, with Spielberg producing.

4. Then-Universal chief Sid Sheinberg wanted the heroine's mother renamed Lorraine, after his wife, "Jaws" star Lorraine Gary. He also wanted the film's title changed to "Spaceman from Pluto," reportedly believing that no film with the word "future" in the title could be a hit. Zemeckis and Gale accepted the first request but rejected the second.

5. Marty McFly was named after a production assistant Zemeckis and Gale had known on the set of "Used Cars."6. Bullying villain Biff Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson, pictured) was named for Ned Tanen, a studio executive Zemeckis and Gale had clashed with during the making of "Used Cars."

7. To play Marty, the filmmakers wanted Michael J. Fox, but he was unavailable due to his commitment to his hit NBC sitcom, "Family Ties." Instead, they hired Eric Stoltz, fresh from his star-making dramatic performance in "Mask." As the shoot progressed, however, it became clear to the filmmakers that Stoltz wasn't working out. His performance was too "heavy" and lacked the comic energy they were looking for. Five weeks into the shoot, Zemeckis made the painful decision to fire the actor and replace him with Fox, who had arranged to shoot "Family Ties" during the day and "Back to the Future" at night. You can see some of the extant footage of Stoltz as Marty, along with the filmmakers discussing his firing, in this video.

8.Crispin Glover, who played Marty's father, is actually three years younger than Fox.

9.Christopher Lloyd landed the role of Marty's inventor pal, Doc Brown, beating out his "Buckaroo Banzai" co-star John Lithgow, as well as Dudley Moore and Jeff Goldblum.

10. Einstein, Doc's dog and the time machine's first test pilot, was originally written as a chimp.

11. Lea Thompson was cast as Marty's mother because the filmmakers liked her chemistry with Stoltz in the movie "The Wild Life."12. Yes, that's Billy Zane (far left), in his first feature role, as one of teenage Biff's thug pals.

13. Melora Hardin, best known for playing Jan on NBC's "The Office," was originally cast as Marty's girlfriend, Jennifer. It would have been a big break for her, but before she'd shot a single scene, Stoltz was fired, and she was fired too because she was so much taller than Fox. Claudia Wells was hired in her place.

14. The famous Hill Valley clock tower, so pivotal to the plot, stands on Courthouse Square, a set on the Universal backlot that's been used in such famous films as "To Kill a Mockingbird" and the Spielberg-produced "Gremlins." After its use in the "BTTF" trilogy, it popped up again on TV's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and in the movie "Bruce Almighty."

15. Originally, Gale's time machine was a stationary box -- a refrigerator, in fact. To harness the power needed to make it travel through time, there was to be a scene where the fridge (with Marty inside), was taken to a nuclear test site in Nevada, where Doc Brown would somehow capture the energy from an atomic explosion. Zemeckis ultimately rejected this idea, fearing that impressionable kids would accidentally lock themselves in refrigerators and suffocate. But producer Spielberg liked the fridge-nuking idea enough to use it 23 years later in "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull."

16. Instead, Zemeckis came up with the idea of a mobile time machine, which led to the idea of using a DeLorean. The gull-wing-door car, already something of a time capsule joke even in 1985, was ideal, Zemeckis figured, because it could easily be mistaken for a flying saucer.

17. The filmmakers had a product-placement deal with Pepsi (there's even a Pepsi Free joke written into the script). The cola bottler objected to a similar joke about Tab (a product of rival soda maker Coca-Cola), but the filmmakers refused to cut it.18. For Marty's all-important rock 'n' roll performance at the school dance, Fox learned to mimic the guitar moves with his hands, but his showboating solo was dubbed by guitarist Tim May. His vocals were dubbed by singer Mark Campbell of Jack Mack and the Heart Attack.

19. Remarkably, there are only 32 special-effects shots in the movie.

20. "Back to the Future" cost $19 million to make, including the $3 million spent on re-shooting the Stoltz footage.

21. Zemeckis was worried that the movie's box office would suffer because Fox was unavailable to promote it, having to be in London shooting a "Family Ties" special.

22. In fact, the film earned $211 million and became the top-grossing movie of 1985.23. The film was No. 1 on the box office charts for 11 of 12 weeks throughout the summer of 1985. (It was knocked out of the top spot once, by "National Lampoon's European Vacation," but then it returned.)

24. "Future" was nominated for four Oscars. It won the prize for Best Sound Effects Editing. It was also nominated for Best Original Screenplay, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Original Song, for Huey Lewis' "The Power of Love."

25. President Ronald Reagan was a fan of the film, even appreciating Doc's joke at his expense. Six months after the film's release, during the 1986 State of the Union address, Reagan quoted Doc's famous line: "Where we're going, we don't need roads."

26. Claudia Wells dropped out of the sequels, reportedly to take care of her cancer-stricken mother, which is why she was replaced with Elisabeth Shue.27. Crispin Glover also didn't appear in the sequels because of a salary dispute. Glover claims he was being given less than half of what the other principals were being offered. He also has said he believes his notoriously demented guest appearance on "Late Night with David Letterman" scared the filmmakers away. Nonetheless, he eventually reconciled with Zemeckis and played Grendel in the director's motion-capture epic, "Beowulf."

28. For his stand-up comedy performances, Tom Wilson composed a song that answers all the annoying questions people have asked him whenever they recognize him as Biff.

29. Zemeckis and Gale are preparing a stage musical version of "Back to the Future," due to premiere in London later this year.

30. As far as a film reboot is concerned, however, Zemeckis and Gale have said it will happen over their dead bodies. They mean that literally, as they made sure their Universal contract stipulated that no one could remake the film while either of them is still alive.
]]>2015-07-03T09:00:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/07/03/back-to-the-future-facts/21203977Looks like we picked the wrong week to quit celebrating milestones.

Hard to believe it's been 35 years since "Airplane!" took flight (on July 2, 1980) and taught us all to speak jive, order the chicken instead of the fish, and avoid calling each other "Shirley." Three and a half decades later, the airline disaster parody remains one of the funniest films ever made, one that generations of viewers have watched over and over -- though probably never as an in-flight movie.

Still, as many times as you've seen it, there's much you may not know about how it was made. In honor of "Airplane!" turning 35, here are a few facts every fan must know about the comedy classic.

1. Strip away all the jokes, and "Airplane!" is essentially a remake of a little-known 1957 air disaster movie called "Zero Hour!" The writing/directing team of Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker lifted the plot, some of the character names, much of the dialogue, and the exclamation point in the title from the film. "Zero" was written by Arthur Hailey, later famous as the writer of the original "Airport."

2. The ZAZ team discovered the old film during their practice of taping late-night TV in order to find commercials worth spoofing in their sketch comedy troupe, Kentucky Fried Theater. They copied the script as an exercise in learning how to write a screenplay. But their original screenplay for "Airplane!" also incorporated parodies of late-night TV ads.

3. The "Airplane!" script borrowed so much from "Zero Hour!" that ZAZ took the precaution of avoiding a copyright infringement suit by buying the remake rights, for a grand total of $2,500.

4. ZAZ wanted to direct their film as well as write it, but they didn't have the clout to do so until the success of "The Kentucky Fried Movie," the 1977 sketch anthology that included ad spoofs of the sort that were trimmed out of the "Airplane!" script.5. To play the hero, Ted Striker, Paramount wanted ZAZ to cast a conventional comic lead, like Chevy Chase or Bill Murray. But the filmmakers wanted someone who could work on their deadpan comic wavelength. Among those who auditioned for the role were Bruce Jenner and a then-unknown comic named David Letterman. (Yep, that happened.)

6. Ultimately, the part went to Robert Hays, who had to shoot much of the picture rushing back and forth on the Paramount lot between the sets of "Airplane!" and "Angie," the sitcom in which he co-starred. One plus: Hays was actually a licensed pilot.

7. A pre-fame Sigourney Weaver auditioned to play the heroine, Elaine, but the filmmakers have said she balked at the line "... sit on your face and wriggle." The role ultimately went to Julie Hagerty, who made her film debut in "Airplane!"

8. The co-pilot role played by basketball titan Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was a nod to a similar role played by football star Elroy "Crazylegs" Hirsch in "Zero Hour!" Originally, ZAZ sought Pete Rose, but the diamond legend was too busy playing baseball to be available for the August shoot. The studio offered Abdul-Jabbar $30,000 for the part, but his agent talked his fee up to $35,000, the price of an Oriental rug the Lakers star wanted to buy.

9. The supporting cast consisted largely of stone-faced actors known for playing serious roles in similar films. Robert Stack, who played Rex Kramer, had starred in 1954's "The High and the Mighty," one of the first air disaster films.10. Lloyd Bridges, who played air traffic controller McCroskey, had starred on TV in the drama "San Francisco International Airport." ZAZ had sought "Airport" franchise mainstay George Kennedy for the role, but he and Universal felt that appearing in the spoof would damage the franchise.

11. Similarly, the filmmakers sought Helen Reddy to portray the singing nun as a spoof on her role in "Airport 1975," but Universal wouldn't let her. Instead, the filmmakers cast Maureen McGovern, known for singing the themes to disaster movies "The Poseidon Adventure" and "The Towering Inferno."

12. Peter Graves, best known for starring on TV's "Mission: Impossible," got the role as Capt. Oveur in part as a nod to his role in the TV air disaster movie, "SST Death Flight."13. Leslie Nielsen, who had played the doomed ship captain in "The Poseidon Adventure," rounded out the cast as Dr. Rumack. Of course, "Airplane!" launched a second career for him as a deadpan comic leading man in movies from the "Naked Gun" movies to the "Scary Movie" horror spoofs.

14. While Nielsen is better known these days for his three decades of comedy (he died in 2010), he was still known at the time of the film's release as a stoic dramatic actor like Stack and Graves. But he insisted that he had always wanted to be a comedian, only no one had ever cast him in a funny role.

15. To prove his comic bona fides, and to break up the cast and crew, Nielsen traveled everywhere with a handheld whoopee cushion. He sold the devices to others on the set, until the shoot was so preoccupied with fart noises that the filmmakers had to confiscate them all.

16. The military pilot with post-traumatic stress disorder (watch below) who thinks he's Ethel Merman was played, of course, by Ethel Merman. It was the last movie for the 72-year-old musical theater legend.17. To play the grandmotherly white lady who speaks jive, the filmmakers wanted Harriet Nelson, but she felt insecure about the language. Instead, they got another 1950s sitcom mom, Barbara Billingsley. Her "Leave It to Beaver" had been one of the team's favorite shows as kids.

18. The voiceover actors who play Betty and Vernon, the squabbling couple making the curbside "red zone/white zone" argument outside the terminal, are the real-life married couple who had recorded the same announcements at Los Angeles International airport. The dialogue, in which they argue over whether or not Betty should have an abortion, is taken from Hailey's original "Airport" novel.

19. Jimmie Walker ("Good Times") is one of the few comic actors to play a cameo. He's the filling station attendant who squeegees the plane's windshield and takes Capt. Oveur's credit card imprint.20. The ZAZ team themselves have cameos in the film, as do several of their family members. The Zucker brothers are the ground crew at the beginning who accidentally cause a plane to crash through a terminal gate window. Abrahams is one of the religious fanatics Rex Kramer knocks over. Mom Charlotte Zucker is the passenger trying in vain to apply her makeup. The Zuckers' sister, Susan Breslau, plays a ticket agent. Abrahams' mother is the woman initially sitting next to Dr. Rumack.

21. Goofy closing credits have become a ZAZ trademark. Watch "Airplane!" all the way through, and along with the names of gaffers and grips, you'll see credits like, "Author of 'A Tale of Two Cities': Charles Dickens" and "Thirteenth President of the United States: Millard Fillmore."

22. The movie only cost $3.5 million to make. It earned back $83 million and was the fourth biggest hit of 1980.

23. Much of the cast returned for the inevitable "Airplane II: The Sequel," but ZAZ had nothing to do with writing or directing it.

24. In 2014, Delta Airlines issued an '80s-themed in-flight safety video that ended with a cameo by Abdul-Jabbar, back in the cockpit again.

25. Also in 2014, Hays and Abdul-Jabbar reprised their "Airplane!" roles for a TravelWisconsin.com tourism video, which included a reminder that the hoops legend used to play for the Milwaukee Bucks. Otto the Autopilot makes a cameo as well.

]]>2015-07-02T10:30:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/07/02/airplane-facts/21202280Thunder buddies for life? Not for audiences, at least.

"Ted 2" fans proved shockingly disloyal this weekend, ponying up only $32.9 million for the sequel -- off more than $20 million from what the original "Ted" made ($54.4 million) three years ago over the same weekend frame. It was supposed to give holdovers "Jurassic World" and "Inside Out" a close race for the top spot. Instead, it came in third place, while "Jurassic" and "IO" finished as expected with $54.2 million and $52.1 million, respectively.

1. The Novelty's Worn Off A foul-mouthed, pot-smoking teddy bear was pretty funny the first time. The second time? Not so much. "Ted" seems to have been playing on permanent rotation on cable for the past three years, and instead of whetting appetites for a sequel, it seems to have worn out the bear's welcome.

2. Seth MacFarlane Is Wearing Out His Welcome, Too Since the first "Ted" opened, MacFarlane has hosted the Oscars -- to decidedly mixed reviews -- and wrote, directed and starred in last summer's "A Million Ways to Die in the West," which was universally panned and topped out at $43.1 million -- about $11 million less than "Ted" earned upon its opening weekend.

MacFarlane's not over, by any means (he still has his two long-running primetime cartoons), but his fanbase isn't what it used to be. And few seem to want to see him on camera, even if he is voicing a sentient, pot-smoking bear.

3. The Audience Has Grown UpWell, sort of.

An R-rated comedy depends on adult viewers, of course, but exit polling shows that only about half of "Ted 2" ticketbuyers were over 25. The grown-ups stayed away, perhaps for the two reasons listed above, and perhaps because reviews for "Ted 2" were much worse than those for its predecessor. Since the over-25 audience actually still cares somewhat about reviews, the pans probably hurt the movie. Moviegoers who've actually seen the comedy liked it enough to give it a B+ CinemaScore, but decent word-of-mouth won't help people see it if weak reviews kept them away in the first place.

4. Fierce CompetitionOr at least a zoo, with the poor bear fighting not just genetically-enhanced dinosaurs at the box office, but also emotions inside a little girl's head. "Ted 2" faced the one-two punch of over-performers "Jurassic World" and "Inside Out" this weekend, competition that the first film didn't have to face. A strong argument can be made for "Ted 2's" audience getting lost on their pay to see "Jurassic" and "IO" again.

5. R-Rated Comedies Are StrugglingThis summer, anyway.

Four-week old "Spy," while critically praised, is a bit of a slow-starter at the box office. But it's held steady at the box office, boasting small drop-offs week to week, so some of "Ted 2's" fanbase may have got their laughs from Melissa McCarthy instead. Even four-week-old "Spy" may have knocked some of the stuffing out of "Ted 2." "Spy" finished fifth this week, with an estimated $7.8 million, for a four-week total of $88.4 million. That's good considering that it, too, is competing against "Jurassic World" and "Inside Out."

The underperformance of "Ted 2" ends Universal's recent streak of franchise-based hits that it has been enjoying all year, from "Fifty Shades of Grey" to "Furious 7" to "Pitch Perfect 2" to "Jurassic World." While nobody anticipated just how huge "Jurassic World" was going to be, Universal should have anticipated that its audience would be demographically broad enough to steal some of the thunder from its little thunder buddy and shouldn't have positioned them just two weeks apart.

No doubt Amy Schumer is relieved that Universal isn't opening her R-rated comedy, "Trainwreck," until July 17. That'll put three weeks between it and "Ted 2" and five weeks between it and "Jurassic World." After all, those dinosaurs will eat any critter, no matter who created it.
]]>2015-06-28T16:45:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/06/28/why-ted-2-stumbled-at-box-office/21201359 Given all the musicals we've seen on TV recently -- NBC's live-performance versions of "Peter Pan" and "The Sound of Music," not to mention ABC's "Galavant" and all six seasons of Fox's "Glee" -- it's a wonder that the pipeline hasn't flowed in the opposite direction, from the small screen to Broadway.

That may change with the announcements that a couple of TV-based musicals are in the works. One is "Bombshell," the Marilyn Monroe biographical musical that was created and staged over the course of two seasons on NBC's "Smash." Bringing it to Broadway would seem easy enough -- the songs and choreography already exist; all that's needed is a book.

The other is a stage version of "Downton Abbey," which may launch after the British drama's sixth and final season wraps this winter. John Lunn, who composes the music for the series, says he envisions an international tour, starring the TV cast and writer/creator Julian Fellowes as a narrator, along with some period music you might hear on the Crawleys' gramophones (Elgar, 1920s jazz).

Are these even aa good idea? "Smash" wasn't exactly a hit series (it ran from 2012-13), so it's not clear that there's much of a market for a "Smash"-derived musical. On the other hand, the songs were more popular than the show, and anything with Monroe's name in it ought to be a big seller.

The "Downton" show doesn't sound much more promising, though anyone who watched their hilarious guest spots on "Galavant" knows that Hugh Bonneville (Lord Grantham) and Sophie McShera (kitchen maid Daisy) can sing. Elizabeth McGovern (Lady Cora) has fronted her own rock band, Sadie and the Hotheads. Who knows if Maggie Smith can sing or dance, but who wouldn't pay money to see her try?

Still, the fact that these TV series are even being pondered as possible stage musicals probably says more about the current desperation of Broadway than it does about TV. After all, Broadway commonly adapts books, movies, straight plays, pop stars' back catalogs, and even comic books into musicals, yet TV adaptations are as rare on Broadway as belters whose voices can reach the back row without body mics.

Among the handful of TV series that have made it to the stage is "The Addams Family" (the 2010 Broadway musical purports to be based on the Charles Addams cartoons that were also the inspiration for the 1960s sitcom, but it's clear that the characterizations owe pretty much everything to the TV show and the movies it spawned). Some British shows have been adapted as straight plays, including "Yes, Prime Minister" and "Doctor Who" (which has spawned at least three plays over the past 50 years).

Back in 1992, Jill Soloway mounted a touring production called "The Real Live Brady Bunch," which staged tongue-in-cheek performances of individual "Brady Bunch" episodes. Soloway would go on to become a top TV writer/producer herself ("Six Feet Under," "Transparent"). The show featured Melanie Hutsell as Jan Brady (a character she would reprise on TV after she joined the cast of "Saturday Night Live") and, as Mike and Carol Brady, a pre-fame Andy Richter ("Conan") and Jane Lynch ("Glee"). Speaking of "Glee," back when the "Glee" cast first went on a concert tour five years ago, there was a rumor that the show's creators were developing a stage musical version as well, but it never happened. But the two tours at least featured the TV cast performing in character.

It's clear why TV hasn't been a wellspring for stage adaptations: it's hard to cram a lengthy TV series into a 2 1/2- hour show. And there may be a psychological barrier, for both producers and audiences, in coming to terms with an expensive stage adaptation of something you can watch every night for free (or almost free), in syndicated reruns or binge-watched as part of your streaming subscription.

Nonetheless, it seems like more TV-to-Broadway adaptations are inevitable. Not only is Broadway always hungry for new material with brand recognition, but it's also spent the last decade or so getting a number of its most popular performers from TV. "American Idol," in particular, has been a strong source of Broadway talent, with the likes of Fantasia Barrino, Clay Aiken, Jordin Sparks, Justin Guarini, Frenchie Davis, Constantine Maroulis, Taylor Hicks, Ace Young, Diana DeGarmo, Syesha Mercado, and Crystal Bowersox all using their Fox-bred fame to sell musical theater tickets. "The Voice" Season 6 winner Josh Kaufman went straight to the Broadway musical stage last year, starring in a revival of "Pippin."

With TV creating the next generation of Broadway musical stars, it seems it's only a matter of time before the medium generates the shows themselves. The secret seems to be using shows that can be spun off into self-contained stories. Shorn of "Smash"'s backstage drama about its creation, "Bombshell" works in that respect, "Downton Abbey," which has always been more about character interaction than plot, could also come up with a brief storyline that doesn't require a lot of character evolution or elaborate plot developments. And there's no reason a musical couldn't use the "Doctor Who" or "Brady Bunch" model and offer just a single episodic story from the show's familiar lore.

A stage adaptation of "Glee" or "Galavant" could certainly work, though it's likely that more nostalgia-minded titles would sell more tickets. Imagine a musical version of "Frasier," a show that often borrowed from the structure and timing of door-slamming stage farce. And if "Doctor Who" works, why not "Star Trek: The Musical"? Now that "Seinfeld" is all over Hulu, why not Broadway? They could serve Junior Mints and slices of marble rye at intermission. (But not Pez.) It's Tony gold, Jerry, Tony gold!
]]>2015-06-26T12:00:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/06/26/could-your-favorite-tv-show-become-a-broadway-musical/21199724"Cooley High" ought to be remembered as a cinema milestone, and its writer and director remembered as pioneers.

Released 40 years ago this week (on June 25, 1975), it ought to be celebrated for its vast influence on movies, TV, and music. As a young-men-coming-of-age movie, it deserves to be mentioned alongside Fellini's "I Vitelloni," George Lucas's "American Graffiti," Barry Levinson's "Diner," and John Singleton's "Boyz N the Hood." And yet, the film and its creators have been largely forgotten, lost to history.

The story behind "Cooley High" is even more dramatic than the comedy-drama that unspooled on the screen. It's the story of Kenneth Williams, who, like protagonist Preach, left Chicago's Cabrini-Green projects with dreams of becoming a Hollywood screenwriter. Having dropped out of high school, he hitchhiked from the Windy City to Hollywood with $5 in his pocket and no connections, and for a while he supported himself selling drugs. But the aspiring writer, who renamed himself Eric Monte, also befriended actor Mike Evans, who'd been cast as neighbor Lionel Jefferson on the groundbreaking sitcom "All in the Family." Through Evans, Monte pitched the show's producer, Norman Lear, a script introducing the characters of Lionel's parents, George and Louise Jefferson. Lear bought the script and eventually spun off George, Weezy, and Lionel into their own hit sitcom, "The Jeffersons," but Monte was neither hired as a staff writer nor given credit or residuals for "The Jeffersons," which ran from 1975 to 1985. Evans and Monte co-created another sitcom for Lear, the hit "Good Times," about a family struggling in a Chicago project much like the one where Monte grew up. But Monte again clashed with the show's producers (as did John Amos, who played patriarch James Evans) over what he felt was the show's increasing drift away from social issues in favor of clowning by the show's breakout character, Jimmie Walker's catchphrase-spouting J.J. ("Dy-no-mite!") Monte was frozen out of the show, and Amos was fired and written out of the series.

Monte still hungered to tell a story of black life in the Chicago projects that resembled his own experience, which he characterized as fun and not just gritty. The result was the screenplay for "Cooley High," which he sold to American International Pictures, an independent studio then known for drive-in fare and exploitation pictures.

But "Cooley High" was no exploitation film. Unlike the other black stories being told on screen in the early '70s, this one wasn't about crime, racism, drugs, vengeance, or black-power heroes and heroines who stuck it to the Man. It was just about teens doing what teens do -- hanging out, going to school, going to parties, hooking up, cruising the streets, and dreaming of the future. Yes, there was petty crime and some tragic violence, but they weren't the main focus of the story. It was just a slice of life, both specific and universal. As a result, "Cooley High" marked the beginning of the shift in African-American cinema away from blaxploitation toward more diverse stories of black life, although it would take another 20 years for that transition to be fully realized. Hired to direct the film was Michael Schultz, who was in a unique position to make that shift. An admirer of European masters like Fellini and Bergman, he came to the cinema via Broadway. He'd directed a play there called "Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie?", which won a Tony for its young star, an unknown actor named Al Pacino. It also landed Schultz his first feature, the TV movie "To Be Young, Gifted, and Black." By the time he landed the "Cooley High" assignment, the African-American Schultz had directed three films, none of them blaxploitation dramas.

Much of the cast of "Cooley High" consisted of non-professional actors from the Chicago projects where the film was to be shot. But the leads were pros who would all soon go on to greater successes. Glynn Turman, who played writer/dreamer Preach, went on to a long career as a character actor, one that has continued to this day with recurring roles on shows from "A Different World" to "The Wire" to the current "House of Lies," where he plays Don Cheadle's father. Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, who played high school basketball star Cochise, would soon go on to stardom as another high schooler, Freddy Washington, on TV's "Welcome Back, Kotter." (Years later, he'd deliver a fearsome performance as Jackson family patriarch Joe Jackson in the mini-series "The Jacksons: An American Dream.") Garrett Morris, a real-life former schoolteacher who played history instructor Mr. Mason, would become famous a few months later as an original cast member of "Saturday Night Live." (Today, you can see him as Earl on "2 Broke Girls.") There was also a local kid playing a young basketball player, an actor who followed in Monte's footsteps and became a pioneering African-American filmmaker. That was Robert Townsend, future creator of "Hollywood Shuffle" and "The Five Heartbeats."When it came out, "Cooley High" earned a lot of comparisons to "American Graffiti," released two years earlier. Both films were set in the early '60s, both were about high school boys on the cusp of adulthood who were still fixated on cars and girls and music, both featured characters who got mixed up in petty crime, and both had nostalgic soundtracks of wall-to-wall golden oldies. The "Cooley High" soundtrack was almost entirely made up of vintage Motown hits, which were available cheaply then (it would be another eight years or so before the big Motown nostalgia boom suddenly put a premium on such tunes). One new song, however, was G.C. Cameron's ballad "It's So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday." Sixteen years later, Motown's own Boyz II Men would cover that song on their debut album -- entitled "Cooleyhighharmony" in homage to the film -- and make it into an anthem for a new generation.

"Cooley High" cost just $750,000 to make, but it earned back $13 million. Its success drew the attention of ABC, which tried to convert it into a sitcom. The network felt that Monte's pilot didn't really work, so the show was retooled and softened. The result was the hit high school sitcom "What's Happening!!", for which Monte got a producer credit, and which ran for three years. It made stars out of Ernest Thomas and Fred "Rerun" Berry and even spawned an '80s follow-up series, "What's Happening Now!!", following the high-school pals as young adults.

Schultz became one of the first black directors to find regular work with mainstream Hollywood studios. After "Cooley High," he directed three of Richard Pryor's best films: "Car Wash" (another musical slice-of-life comedy/drama), "Which Way Is Up?", and the racing biopic "Greased Lightning." He also directed 1978's "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," a musical with a predominantly white cast (including the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton) and an all-Beatles soundtrack. The movie was a huge flop, though it did give Steve Martin his first major film role, and the soundtrack did generate hits for Aerosmith and Earth Wind & Fire. The film's failure nearly derailed Schultz's career, though he bounced back in the 1980s with Motown-produced adventure "The Last Dragon" and seminal hip-hop film "Krush Groove." He's continued to work in film and television, with his most recent big-screen credit 2004's "Woman Thou Art Loosed." He currently directs episodic TV on such hit shows as "Arrow" and "Black-ish."After "What's Happening!!" became a hit, Monte sued ABC, CBS, and Lear's production company for money he felt he was owed for his TV creations. He received a $1 million settlement but said he was blackballed from the industry thereafter. It would be decades before he sold another script (he wrote episodes of '90s comedies "The Wayans Bros." and "Moesha"). He spent most of his settlement mounting an original play that flopped, and the rest on crack. In the mid-2000s, he was off drugs and living in a Los Angeles-area homeless shelter. Illinois state representative Ken Dunkin, another former Cabrini-Green resident, raised the funds for Monte to return to subsidized housing in his hometown, where he hoped to continue to write scripts, always claiming to be one great idea away from his next smash. He resurfaced in Hollywood in February for a reunion with Turman, Hilton-Jacobs, and Townsend at a 40th anniversary screening of the film, which finally came out on Blu-ray earlier this year. If the long-gestating "Good Times" movie ever gets made, Monte may indeed find himself back in the spotlight.

Did Monte and Schultz deserve better from Hollywood? At the very least, they deserve to be celebrated for their pioneering work in telling stories about African-American life that were more than just cautionary tales of gangstas and ghettoes. Spike Lee, who has done more than anyone else to expand the range of black stories that can be told on screen, has cited "Cooley High" as an influence and an essential movie for all aspiring filmmakers to watch.

The transition towards greater inclusiveness that "Cooley High" started is far from complete. Still, when producers like Will Packer make films like "Think Like a Man" into crossover hits, when black directors are hired to make superhero blockbusters, when a star-free black high school comedy like "Dope" opens in the top five with a healthy $6.1 million (as it did this past weekend), and when the top writer/producer on TV is Shonda Rhimes, it sometimes feels like everyone is a graduate of "Cooley High."
]]>2015-06-25T09:00:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/06/25/cooley-high-most-influential-movie/21199134Most box office pundits expected Disney/Pixar's "Inside Out" to cower before the might of "Jurassic World's" dinosaurs this weekend and become the first film in Pixar's 20 years of feature filmmaking to fail to open atop the box office chart. And while that's what happened, no one predicted that "Inside Out" would still set a box office record with its stunning estimated $91.1 million premiere.

No one was predicting better than $70 million for the cartoon. But on a per-screen basis, it actually came within a hair's-breadth of "Jurassic World," which earned $23,775 per venue, just $599 more than the $23,076 per screen that "Inside Out" scored.

Indeed, throughout a summer that (until "Jurassic World's" record-smashing debut last weekend) looked like it was going to slump well below last summer's numbers, industry observers have been consistently underestimating this season's hits. That includes the bean-counters at Disney itself, who went into the weekend expecting a $65-to-$70 million opening for "Inside Out" and found themselves adjusting their predictions upward almost hour-by-hour on Friday and Saturday. Even late Saturday, they were still predicting a mid-80s debut, while crossing their fingers to break $90 million. Admittedly, all studio marketers like to predict conservatively, so that it's a pleasant surprise if the movie surpasses expectations and less of a disappointment if it doesn't.

But even independent observers have been giving lowball predictions all summer, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. Everybody was off by at least $80 million last weekend with "Jurassic World," and most were off by at least $20 million this weekend with "Inside Out."

Why have the pundits been so consistently wrong? Perhaps they're still stuck following conventional wisdom from years past about what's actually happening at the multiplex these days. Here are a few box office lessons for those who haven't reexamined the old maxims.

Originality isn't dead. Remember a few weeks ago, when pundits were writing off "Tomorrowland" and "Aloha" as failures of originality? Original movies don't work, the conventional wisdom said, and audiences now only want sequels and reboots. In fact, "Tomorrowland" and "Aloha" could be chalked up to failures of both marketing (how to sell a movie whose very premise is a secret, or can't be easily summarized in a sentence?) and execution (critics and audience both felt that neither film delivered).

This weekend, "Inside Out" shattered the record for the biggest opening weekend for a movie with an original screenplay. (The previous record-holder was 2009's "Avatar," at $77 million.) Granted, you could argue that the movie was easier for Disney to market than "Tomorrowland," since the Pixar brand is so strong, it practically sells itself, and since "Inside Out" is a movie that critics and audiences agree is actually good. Still, all these caveats prove is that audiences will go see an original movie if it's well-made and properly marketed.

3D isn't dead. It's long been assumed that American audiences aren't as fond of 3D as viewers overseas, since North American theaters slap costly glasses-rental surcharges on 3D or IMAX tickets. If as much as 15 or 20 percent of a movie's revenue was attributable to 3D screenings, that was a healthy number. So far, however, 47 percent of "Jurassic World" revenue has come from 3D screenings, and 11 percent has come from IMAX. That follows a trend for boosted 3D revenue for such summer 2015 movies as "San Andreas," "Mad Max: Fury Road," and "Avengers: Age of Ultron." "Inside Out" continued this trend with 28 percent of this weekend's earnings coming from 3D venues.

Female protagonists work. You'd think this would be obvious after the successes this summer of "Pitch Perfect 2," "Spy," and (arguably) "Mad Max: Fury Road." Not to mention the successes of other recent female-fronted Disney cartoon, especially "Frozen," the biggest animated box office hit of all time. Nonetheless, it helps to keep reminding Hollywood of this, especially with a movie whose principal voice cast is almost entirely female, and in a narrative that doesn't involve princesses. What's more, the movie has been a smash overseas, too, disproving the notion that the foreign audiences that are now the industry's most lucrative customers don't want to see women in lead roles.

The theatrical experience isn't dead. This may be the single biggest reason that this summer's hits are exceeding expectations. For along time, pundits have been declaring the multiplex dead, citing declining numbers of tickets sold. And yet, this summer's movies prove that, if you want to lure people off their couches and away from their home entertainment systems, all you have to do is release movies people actually want to see.
]]>2015-06-22T11:00:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/06/22/inside-out-box-office/21196995Lady and the Tramp" has been not just one of the most beloved Disney animated features ever made, but also one of the great romances in screen history.

Still, as often as you've seen it, there's still plenty you may not know about how the canine classic came to be, So grab a plate of spaghetti and meatballs and chow down on 19 of "Lady"'s behind-the-scenes dish.1. It took nearly 20 years to get the film made. The main character originated in sketches made by Disney animator Joe Grant in 1937, based on his own spaniel, whose name was Lady. Grant envisioned a short cartoon about a dog who's puzzled by the arrival of his masters' newborn baby.

2. By 1940, Walt Disney had imagined expanding the short into a feature and adding a dog-hating housesitter, two mischievous Siamese cats (then named Nip and Tuck), and a suitor for Lady, a mongrel who might be named Homer or Rags or Bozo. Unable to settle on a name for the wandering, homeless pooch, Walt decided to just go with Tramp.

3. In 1943, Walt read Ward Greene's short story "Happy Dan: The Cynical Dog" in Cosmopolitan magazine, the tale of a stray who revels in his ability to manipulate humans all over town into giving him free meals. Disney bought the film rights, but it took another eight years to merge the dog tales into the "Lady and the Tramp" screenplay.

4. In 1953, two years before the film's release, Walt had Greene expand his story into a novel, so that moviegoers would be familiar with the tale by the time the movie came out.

5. The scene where Darling opens a gift-wrapped hat box to find the puppy Lady inside is based on an incident from Walt Disney's own life, in which he presented his wife Lillian with the Christmas gift of a Chow puppy in a hat box.6. Peggy Lee was perhaps the first major star to sign on as a voice actor in a Disney cartoon. The torch singer voiced the roles of Darling, pound hound Peg, and cats Si and Am. She also co-wrote all the songs (with Sonny Burke) and sang four of them ("What Is a Baby," "La La Lu," "The Siamese Cat Song," and "He's a Tramp").

7. In 1988, Lee sued Disney over music royalties from the successful video release. It took three years, but she won $2.3 million.

8. Barbara Luddy was 46 when she voiced the youthful Lady. She would go on to perform the voices of the fairy Merryweather in Disney's "Sleeping Beauty" and Kanga in several of Disney's "Winnie the Pooh" shorts.

9. Lee Millar, who voiced Lady's master, Jim Dear, was the son of Verna Felton, who voiced the part of cat-loving visitor Aunt Sarah. She had earlier played the Fairy Godmother in Disney's "Cinderella" and the Queen of Hearts in the studio's "Alice in Wonderland."

10. Larry Roberts, who voiced Tramp, was a stage actor and stand-up comic. "Lady and the Tramp" was his only film role.

11. Other veteran voice artists were brought in from outside the studio. Alan Reed (later the voice of Fred Flintstone) was Boris, the Russian wolfhound. Comic Stan Freberg was the whistling beaver who frees Lady from her muzzle.​12. The iconic spaghetti scene almost didn't happen. Walt nixed the idea, assuming that the spectacle of two animals scarfing down pasta in tomato sauce would be messy and awkward. But animator Frank Thomas worked up a rough version of the scene that changed Disney's mind.

13. The model for Tramp was actually a female mutt that co-screenwriter Erdman "Ed" Penner spotted on the street. The dog vanished into the bushes, but Disney staffers ultimately found her again in the pound, where she was just four hours away from being put down. Once rescued, she lived happily ever after at the Disneyland pony farm.

14. Disney employees brought their dogs to the studios as models for the animators. One of the models for Lady was Felton's own Spaniel, Hildegarde.The other was Blondie, the spaniel of co-director Hamilton Luske.

15. "Lady and the Tramp" was the first animated feature shot in the widescreen CinemaScope format. It's still the widest cartoon Disney ever released in theaters.16. The CinemaScope process meant that the film was essentially made twice: Once in the standard, nearly square aspect ratio, and once in widescreen, after Walt decided to try the new format that was expected to lure people away from those new square boxes in their living rooms. But Walt learned that many theaters were still not equipped to project CinemaScope movies, so he released both versions.

17. The movie cost $4 million to make. During its initial run, it earned $7.5 million. It was the studio's biggest hit since "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" 18 years earlier.

18. Since 1955, Disney has re-released "Lady" into theaters five times. Over the years, it's earned back $93.6 million in theaters

19. Lady and Tramp can both be spotted on a shadowy London street during the twilight-bark sequence in "101 Dalmatians."
]]>2015-06-22T09:00:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/06/22/lady-and-the-tramp-things-you-didnt-know/21198319 The age of the TV anti-hero may be drawing to a close, but the TV anti-heroine is just getting started.

This week, as we welcome back Piper Chapman and her fellow prison inmates (with binge-viewers catching up with the third-season launch of Netflix's "Orange Is the New Black" last Friday), and as we're introduced to Ani Bezzerides -- Rachel McAdams new morally ambiguous cop on Season 2 of HBO's "True Detective," debuting this Sunday -- TV viewers are becoming fully invested in dramas whose female leads are every bit as complicated, fascinating, charismatic, dangerous, and messily human as the Don Drapers and Tony Sopranos of the recent past.

The end of "Mad Men" last month seemed to mark the end of an era, and not just the 1960s as
experienced by the ad gurus at Sterling Cooper. With the departures from our screens in recent years of Don Draper, Jax Teller ("Sons of Anarchy"), Raylan Givens ("Justified"), Rust Cohle (of the first season of "True Detective") and Walter White ("Breaking Bad"), it seemed that TV programmers were closing the book on a certain kind of anti-hero, the kind who'd reigned supreme since "The Sopranos" kicked off the current so-called golden age of TV in 1999.

The creative freedom offered by cable had finally matured into quality dramas as good as anything any other pop culture medium had produced. And all those early quality dramas -- including "The Shield," "Deadwood," "The Wire," and "Dexter" -- seemed built around similar anti-heroes: macho guys who lived by their own code, who often did terrible things, but who were also heroic, if only because they lived in moral universes where everyone else was so much worse. They were men who were capable of great tenderness one moment and brutal violence the next. Critics could read into their complexity any number of things -- critiques of American masculinity, allegories of American financial and military power, muckraking exposés of corruption in American institutions.

But the most radical thing about these new anti-heroes, in TV terms, was that they didn't waste time trying to be likable. They weren't unambiguously good, and their good deeds didn't necessarily redeem all the wrong they had done. They were often not handsome or sexy. They might be charismatic or even admirable at times, but viewers were never allowed to forget that they were being persuaded to care about men who often behaved monstrously.

And for a long time, these anti-heroes were always men. Women protagonists didn't have the luxury of being unlikable, unsexy, or unredeemable.

That began to change about a decade ago with a wave of anti-heroine series, many of them on Showtime. Long before Walter White went from suburban parent to drug kingpin, Nancy Botwin pioneered that career path on "Weeds." Showtime was soon full of similar anti-heroines, mothers and wives who were both competent and reckless, women who were often brazenly sexual and refused to apologize for being so, women who lived by their own rules, even if such behavior occasionally caused harm to themselves or people close to them, striving matriarchs who tried to build a better life for their husbands or children but who also jeopardized that better life with the chaos and drama they created through their own headstrong behavior. Women like Jackie Peyton on "Nurse Jackie," Cathy Jamison on "The Big C," Vanessa Ives on "Penny Dreadful," Alison Bailey on "The Affair," Virginia Johnson on "Masters of Sex," and Carrie Mathison on "Homeland."

In the last few years, the anti-heroine has spread beyond Showtime to the rest of cable and even to the networks. HBO has comic anti-heroines: Selina Meyer on "Veep" and all four leads on "Girls." (Not to mention a raft of anti-heroines on "Game of Thrones," including Arya Stark, Brienne of Tarth, Margaery Tyrell, and Daenerys Targaryen.) FX has Elizabeth Jennings on "The Americans" and every character Jessica Lange has played on "American Horror Story." (It also had Patty Hewes on "Damages.") Tatiana Maslany plays several anti-heroines on BBC America's "Orphan Black." Fox has one of this year's biggest breakout characters in Cookie Lyon of "Empire." And ABC has the other with Annalise Keating on "How to Get Away With Murder" -- joining a network roster that already included Olivia Pope on "Scandal," Juliette Barnes on "Nashville," and Emily Thorne on the recently-wrapped "Revenge." And of course, there's Netflix, with Piper and the rest of the "OITNB" convicts, along with Claire Underwood on "House of Cards" and both title characters in "Grace and Frankie."

Why so many anti-heroines? Part of it seems a natural corrective to the testosterone-heavy anti-hero dramas. Part of it is the increase in women TV series auteurs, from Shonda Rhimes ("Scandal," "HTGAWM") to Lena Dunham ("Girls") to Jenji Kohan ("Weeds," "OITNB"). Part of it is that TV has always been friendly to women (at least, more so than film), to the extent that sponsors recognize who controls the household purse strings and are willing to support programming that appeals to women by showing strong female characters. Part of it is the caliber of actresses eager to do TV work, especially now that TV is as prestigious as movies and offers meatier roles for women (especially older women) than film does.

Still, anti-heroines -- and the actresses who play them -- face some obstacles that their male counterparts don't. TV still prefers women to be likable and have certain body types. It expects them to be sexy and sexual -- but not too sexual. It's okay with flamboyant, larger-than-life behavior and dialogue (which make for compelling drama, after all), but it would prefer to have women apologize for, or at least justify such behavior if it harms others. It expects anti-heroines to feel the occasional twinge of guilt for putting career ahead of family, sex ahead of love, themselves ahead of others. There's a fascinating discussion over at the Hollywood Reporter among several anti-heroine actresses (and likely Emmy contenders), including Viola Davis ("HTGAWM"), Taraji P. Henson ("Empire"), Jessica Lange ("American Horror Story"), Lizzy Caplan ("Masters of Sex"), and Ruth Wilson ("The Affair"), where the stars talk about how far TV has come in permitting characters like theirs to flourish, and how treacherous the minefields are that they still have to navigate.

Audiences, programmers, and sponsors who are used to female characters who are likable or sexy or both are only now learning to accept shows featuring anti-heroines who may be neither of those. It will be interesting to see how viewers respond to McAdams' "True Detective" sleuth. But even if they reject her, there'll be more anti-heroines on the way. Maybe we'll get sick of them, or they'll run their course, just as the male anti-heroes have. Right now, however, TV anti-heroines are in full flower. Love them, hate them, love to hate them, but enjoy them while they're here.
]]>2015-06-19T15:00:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/06/19/rise-of-the-tv-anti-heroine/21196391
Forty years after its release (on June 20,1975), "Jaws" often takes the blame for spawning the soulless summer blockbuster, a charge that's not entirely fair, given the Steven Spielberg film's surprisingly personal artistry. But you can blame it for launching a decades-long wave of toothy imitators.

It wasn't just all the shark movies, from "Open Water" to SyFy's "Sharknado" franchise. There were also films that took place far from the ocean. "Alien" got made because it was pitched as "'Jaws' in space." Lion-hunting thriller "The Ghost and the Darkness" was dubbed "'Jaws' with paws." And those are just the pedigreed imitators. What of the even more gloriously exploitative knock-offs? (And we don't just mean the three "Jaws" sequels.)

In honor of Spielberg's classic celebrating its 40th anniversary this week, here are 10 of the "Jaws" rip-offs homages that will give you a chuckle over their cheerful cynicism -- and might also just scare the Speedos off you. ]]>2015-06-18T09:00:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/06/18/11-movies-that-ripped-off-jaws/21194339Besides making people forever afraid of motel-room showers, Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" continues to have an incalculable impact on popular culture. Though it was released 55 years ago this week (on June 16, 1960), it continues to inspire filmmakers and TV producers. In just the last three years, we've seen the 2012 film "Hitchcock" (based on Stephen Rebello's book "Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of 'Psycho,'" and starring Anthony Hopkins as the director and Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh) and the ongoing A&E TV prequel drama series, "Bates Motel."

Still, for all of the "Psycho" trivia revealed in "Hitchcock," the biopic barely scratches the surface of how the film got made, from the men who inspired the invention of Norman Bates, to the trickery Hitchcock used to tease the press while keeping the film's convention-shredding narrative twists a secret, to the film's unlikely connection to "Leave It to Beaver." Here, then, are 25 of the secrets behind "Psycho."1. The film is based on Robert Bloch's novel, which was inspired by Ed Gein, the 1950s Wisconsin serial killer whose case would also inspire such movie murderers as Leatherface (in "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" franchise) and Buffalo Bill (in "The Silence of the Lambs"). Bloch lived just 40 miles from where Gein's murders took place.

2. Another long-rumored inspiration for Bloch's Norman Bates was Calvin Thomas Beck, the middle-aged, bespectacled publisher of the magazine Castle of Frankenstein, who was accompanied everywhere by his smothering mother. Besides the mother-son closeness, the Norman of the novel -- depicted by Bloch as 40-ish, bespectacled, and portly -- more closely resembled Beck than he did Gein or, for that matter, the young and handsome Anthony Perkins.

3. Bloch netted just $5,000 for the sale of the film rights to his novel.

4. A 1959 rumor had Hitchcock buying up all available copies of Bloch's novel in order to preserve the secrecy surrounding his forthcoming movie's plot.

5. One journalist reported the then-top secret film's title to be "Psyche," which prompted rumors that Hitchcock's film had something to do with Greek mythology.

6. To appease the press, Hitchcock claimed that the film would tell the story of "a young man whose mother is a homicidal maniac."7. He also claimed that, for the role of the mother, he considered casting a theatrical grande dame, someone like Helen Hayes or Judith Anderson (who had played the unforgettably creepy Mrs. Danvers in Hitchcock's "Rebecca.") Norma Varden, the old woman whom Robert Walker nearly chokes to death in Hitchcock's "Strangers on a Train," read the reports and lobbied the director for the role of Mrs. Bates.

8. Still, Hitchcock refused to release a plot synopsis to the press, something that was unheard of in those days before "spoiler alert" culture. The only other director who had ever done that was Cecil B. DeMille, who refused to tell reporters the plot of "The Ten Commandments." (Did he really think no one could guess that one?)

9. Hitchcock did, however, let reporters know that a young woman would be murdered in a shower. Asked how he'd get this sequence past the censors, he told the New York Times, "Men do kill nude women, you know."

10. In another tease, Hitchcock allowed the leak of photos from the set of a director's chair emblazoned with the name "Mrs. Bates." There were individual photos of Hitchcock and every major cast member taking turns sitting in the chair -- everyone, that is, except for Perkins.

11. Hitchcock considered Dina Merrill for the role of Marion Crane, but ultimately nixed her as "attractive but too starchy. Too much forehead." Of course, Merrill also wasn't as big a name as Janet Leigh, whose star status helped keep the audience from suspecting that she'd be killed off before the movie was half over.12. The shower murder is one of the most studied montages of film editing ever made. It contains at least 70 edits in just 45 seconds.

13. The cuts are so fast that many viewers believe they've spotted Janet Leigh's nipples (they haven't, though Hitchcock did use Marti Renfro as a nude body double for Leigh in some shots). They also thought they saw multiple frames of the knife piercing her flesh (in fact, it's shown touching her flesh just once).

14. For Leigh's blood, which swirled down the shower drain, Hitchcock used Bosco chocolate syrup.

15. Some viewers have sworn they saw red blood in the shower scene. They may be confusing their memories of "Psycho" with those of William Castle's "The Tingler," a horror film from 1959, which does have a shot of a red, blood-drenched bathtub in an otherwise black-and-white sequence.

16. An urban legend has it that Leigh's screams were prompted by Hitchcock shocking her with cold shower water. Leigh denied this in her memoir, insisting that Hitchcock kept the water warm and comfortable, as the sequence took a whole week to shoot.

17. To create the sound effect of the knife stabbing flesh, Hitchcock sent prop man Bob Bone out to fetch a variety of melons. The director then closed his eyes as Bone took turns stabbing watermelons, casabas, cantaloupes and honeydews. Hitchcock thought about it, opened his eyes to a table covered in fruit gore, and said, "Casaba."18. The voice of "Mother" was provided by three different performers, including one man: Paul Jasmin, a character actor and friend of Anthony Perkins. The others were Virginia Gregg and Jeanette Nolan, two frequent guest stars on "Alfred Hitchcock Presents."

19. Jerry Mathers, best known as the child star of the 1950s sitcom "Leave It to Beaver," claims to have had a hand in the creation of the mummified Mrs. Bates. Mathers (who had also appeared in Hitchcock's "The Trouble With Harry") recalled in 2012 that, not only were "Psycho" and "Beaver" shot on the same lot at Universal Studios, but they also shared a makeup artist, Robert Dawn. Mathers wrote on his website that, one day, Dawn brought to the "Beaver" set the skull he would use for Mrs. Bates. He had to glue on the strands of hair one by one. Mathers asked if he could help, and Dawn let him glue a few strands. "As a young boy, I thought, what could be cooler than this?" Mathers wrote.

20. Hitchcock would later mail that skull to Henri Langlois, the famous French film curator, because the filmmaker assumed that, if he gave it to an American museum, "they'd probably sell it or lose it." Langlois, who put it on display at the Musee du Cinema at La Cinematheque in Paris, found a note from the director accompanying the package, saying simply, "I hope you received my gift."

21. The 1957 Ford sedan that Marion drives was also a prop borrowed from "Leave It to Beaver," where it had served as the Cleaver family's car.

22. The then-unknown actor playing Norman's cell guard at the end of the movie is Ted Knight, still a decade away from TV immortality on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and two decades away from "Caddyshack."

23. The black-and-white film cost just $800,000 to make, a relative bargain after the series of lavish Technicolor productions Hitchcock had filmed in the 1950s. It grossed some $40 million over the course of several theatrical releases. About $15 million of that went to the director himself, who had sold distributor Paramount on the risky project by deferring his salary in exchange for 60 percent of the net profits.

24. Hitchcock sold the film via an innovative, six-minute trailer, in which the director narrates a mordant crime-scene tour of the Bates Motel and Bates mansion, one that ends with a scene of a screaming woman in a shower that's not actually in the movie. (The woman is "Psycho" co-star Vera Miles, not Janet Leigh.) The trailer also announces the movie's famous policy, which Hitchcock mandated to theater owners, of not admitting anyone into the auditorium after the film has started.25. "Psycho" was nominated for four Academy Awards: Best Director, Best Supporting Actress (Leigh), Best Black-and-White Cinematography, and Best Black-and-White Production Design. For all its technical and narrative innovations, "Psycho" didn't win a single Oscar. ]]>2015-06-16T06:00:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/06/16/psycho-25-things-you-didnt-know/21195674Remember the handwringing over the past couple of weeks, when everyone was worried that May's weak box office meant we were in for a summer slump, one that would leave Hollywood's earnings trailing last summer's by more than $700 million?

Well, nevermind.

The opening weekend for "Jurassic World," at $209 million, didn't just set a whole bunch of records. (Biggest opening weekend of all time, biggest June opening ever and biggest debut ever for Universal). It also single-handedly lifted Hollywood out of the box office doldrums it's been in all summer.

At the end of May, the box office was 17.7 percent behind the same period last year. Now, it's up 7.2 percent over last year (May 1 through June 14). This weekend's total theater earnings were twice the size of last week's. And the next several weekends are full of likely blockbusters -- "Inside Out," "Ted 2," "Magic Mike XXL," "Terminator: Genisys," "Minions," "Ant-Man," "Mission: Impossible: Rogue Nation" -- that should help keep up the momentum for the rest of the summer.

And all this because of one gross underestimation.

Sure, pundits had high hopes for "Jurassic World" going into the weekend. They predicted openings anywhere between $100 million (Universal's own conservative guess) and $125 million. The uncertainty was understandable; after all, the movie got mixed reviews, it followed the previous installment by 14 long years (and the last two installments had squandered a lot of the franchise's good will).

Still, the only thing more rare than a $200 million opening weekend is the box office analysts underestimating a film's debut by as much as $75 to $100 million. Maybe $10 million, or $20 million -- or even $30 million, but not this much. The pundits should probably be asking themselves why they keep underestimating this summer's hits by $15 million or more (as they did "Pitch Perfect 2" and "San Andreas"). In the meantime, here's how some of "Jurassic World's" riskier gambles paid off.

1. The Memory Hole"Jurassic World" asked us to forget that the last two sequels ever happened, positioning itself as the first sequel to the original "Jurassic Park." Its marketing sold the nostalgia factor as well, and the film calls back to "JP" with specific shots and locations. This "ret-con" approach doesn't always work. "Superman Returns" asked viewers to forget "Superman III" and "Superman IV: The Quest for Peace." The two "Amazing Spider-Man" movies wanted moviegoers to neuralyze memories of the entire Tobey Maguire "Spider-Man" franchise.

In all of these cases, the willed forgetfulness didn't exactly work -- not because the movies we were asked to forget were so terrific (often, they were not), but because the reboots offered nothing memorable enough to replace them with. Fortunately, "Jurassic World" lived up to the hype (at least as far as audiences were concerned; they gave it an A grade at CinemaScore, indicating very strong word-of-mouth). As a result, it earned more in three days than 2001's "Jurassic Park III" earned in its entire theatrical run ($181.2 million).

2. Chris PrattPratt starred in two of the biggest hits of 2014 -- "The LEGO Movie" and "Guardians of the Galaxy" -- but he still had doubters to win over. Due to all the good will generated by "Guardians," Pratt's popularity amongst audiences helped them turn out in droves, even though the real stars of this franchise are the dinosaurs. After three giant blockbusters in a row, it's safe to assume that we can finally count Pratt as a major box office draw. Surely the nearly-even gender split (Universal's polling indicates an audience that was 52 percent male, 48 percent female) has something to do with Pratt's immense appeal to both men and women.

3. Hiring Director Colin TrevorrowLately, it's been common for studios to hire indie directors with little mainstream Hollywood experience to step up and direct giant, expensive tentpoles. (See Marc Webb on the "Amazing Spider-Man" movies, Gareth Edwards on 2014's "Godzilla," or James Gunn on "Guardians of the Galaxy.") The theory: Better to have good storytelling and character-developing skills than experience marshaling large productions and special effects. For the most part, such risks have paid off.

So it is with Trevorrow, whose last movie was the tiny indie time-travel thriller, "Safety Not Guaranteed." Critics who've grumbled about the sequel's predictable plot and stereotypical characters have been hard pressed to find any of Trevorrow's auteurist stamp on the material. Still, he clearly did what he was paid to do.

4. The IMAX 3D FactorThis is the first film in the franchise to offer first-run screenings in 3D and IMAX. For a long time now, 3D has seemed more trouble than it's worth, with American audiences generally avoiding the extra-surcharge screenings. But this summer's hits -- especially "Avengers: Age of Ultron," "San Andreas," and "Mad Max: Fury Road" -- have enjoyed a box office boost from the 3D surcharges. Speaking of which...

5. Saturation MarketingUniversal and parent company Comcast pulled out all the stops with this film, playing a long marketing game that started two years ago with the 3D re-release of the original "Jurassic Park." The re-release not only earned $45 million, but also whetted the public's appetite for three-dimensional dinosaurs.

This spring, the studio dropped new trailers that revealed an awful lot of the film's surprises (in terms of the movie's new creatures), but they proved effective because they were scary as hell. They also benefited from a moody version of the "Jurassic Park" theme on piano. And the weekend prior to the release of "JW," Comcast rebroadcast "Jurassic Park" on five of its cable channels.

In other words, "Jurassic World" succeeded because there was no escaping its carnivorous maw. It simply ate everything in sight.
]]>2015-06-15T06:00:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/06/15/jurassic-world-destroys-box-office-expectations/21194978 Didja ever notice how politically correct all the kids are now? It's like you can't make jokes about anyone anymore. WHAT is the DEAL with that?

And it's not just college campuses where political correctness chills humor, apparently. It's also the place where Seinfeld was once master of his domain: television. This week, Spike announced it would cut a joke from the June 18 broadcast of the Guys Choice awards ceremony, where Clint Eastwood made a quip about athletes who've tried acting, including "Jim Brown and Caitlyn Somebody." (Eastwood, who cast the transgender Lady Chablis as herself in "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" back in 1997, seems to have been making fun of Caitlyn Jenner's media ubiquity, not the Olynpian's gender transformation, but Spike apparently didn't want to take any chances.)

More broadly, the networks have been slow to develop new sitcoms this season; in the fall, NBC won't have any new ones at all. Part of their skittishness may stem from the reactions they got last year, when they launched such shows as "Black-ish" and "Fresh Off the Boat," which raised concerns about stereotyping and cultural appropriation even before they debuted. This year, upcoming ABC sitcom "The Real O'Neals" (about a Catholic clan whose teen son's emergence from the closet is just one of many awkward family situations) has already inflamed some, not because of its as-yet-unaired content, but because it's loosely inspired by the life of controversial sex columnist and political activist Dan Savage.

Is Seinfeld right? Has political correctness killed comedy?

It's certainly curious that Seinfeld has made himself the standard-bearer for this fight. It's one thing for Chris Rock (Seinfeld's "Bee Movie" co-star), who openly courts controversy, to complain that he also finds college audiences too sensitive, as he did in December. But Seinfeld's jokes generally avoid profane language and political topics. As a standup, he's about as innocuous as comics get. If even he is getting in trouble with the sensitivity police, then something really must be out of whack.

Then again, Seinfeld and Larry David are bazillionaires because their 1990s sitcom, which was politically incorrect enough to make fun of everybody, remains a huge success in syndication and streaming. But maybe it's easy now to enjoy "Seinfeld" in hindsight, since we've all seen the infamous 1998 series finale, which rubs in our faces the show's ultimate joke: that its four protagonists are all petty, horrible human beings who deserve their misfortunes. Making fun of yourself, too, turns out to be a surprisingly potent defense against accusations of political incorrectness, and it's one that the Seinfeld currently complaining about his loss of the privilege of making gay jokes seems to have forgotten.

Comics have been complaining about political correctness for more than half a century. (Listen to Stan Freberg's classic 1957 bit "Elderly Man River.") But it's possible to be funny and even pointedly political, even within the supposed straitjacket of political correctness. The key is to punch up instead of punching down, to make fun of people with more power (including yourself, the guy or gal holding the mic) rather than those with less. Nobody likes a snob or a bully (especially not college students), and it's possible to be hilarious and even edgy without being an arrogant jerk.

Current TV is full of examples -- Louis C.K., Lena Dunham, Amy Schumer, Mindy Kaling, Key & Peele -- who push the envelope of permissible content, score big satirical points, and are funny as hell, all without turning people from marginalized groups into easy punchlines. There are also sitcoms that are deliberately politically incorrect and that do punch down -- particularly, "2 Broke Girls" and anything associated with Chuck Lorre -- that inspire frequent grumbling from both left and right about offensive content, none of which seems to intimidate CBS or its sponsors in the slightest. Guest hosts Rock and C.K. both made "Saturday Night Live" audiences gasp this season when they used their monologues to broach taboo subjects (Rock mocked our response to 9/11, while C.K. explored what motivates child molesters), but neither comic seemed to feel the need to censor himself or apologize, and there's no reason "SNL" would feel squeamish about inviting either of them back, since those monologues made the 40-year-old show seem briefly newsworthy and cutting-edge again.

Would it be wrong to hear a bit of generational divide in Seinfeld's complaint? The comics mentioned in the above paragraph are all younger than Seinfeld by at least a decade, and in some cases, two or three decades. Standup comic and former "Parks and Recreation" co-star Aziz Ansari, who's half Seinfeld's age, is selling out Madison Square Garden and other sports arenas, as well as college appearances. He hasn't griped about crossing the political correctness police. Then again, he's not an older, mega-rich white guy. Not that being a young comic of color should give Ansari more license than it does Seinfeld, but it probably does make it easier for college kids to relate to him.

"Parks," which wrapped its final season earlier this year, was famously a sitcom that didn't have a mean-spirited bone in its body and treated all its characters with empathy and kindness (except, inexplicably, poor scapegoat Jerry), and yet the show was still critically acclaimed, beloved by fans, and sharply satirical in its approach to politics. It offered further proof that TV can be funny, innovative, and razor-witted even when its committed to inclusiveness or accepts the creative challenge of confining itself to certain limitations of expression.

Think, after all, of how funny "Seinfeld" used to be while working within such limits. The show did a whole episode about masturbation ("The Contest") without using the word or showing anything vulgar. It did a whole episode about homosexuality (the famous "Not that there's anything wrong with that" episode) where the humor was not about making fun of gay people but making fun of supposedly tolerant straight people's fear that someone might perceive them as gay. The comedian's current joke referencing the flamboyant gestures of a "gay French king" seems a giant step backward, not just politically, but creatively. Maybe the students didn't laugh because the joke isn't just out of touch, it's weak.

Today's TV comics demonstrate that there are many ways to explore taboo topics, make politically pointed jokes that are funnier than they are pedantic, and deflect criticism by making fun of yourself first. Whether you're Jerry Seinfeld or a programming executive, to claim you can make comedy only if you have free rein to make fun of the less powerful smacks of creative laziness at best and thuggery at worst.
]]>2015-06-12T14:00:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/06/12/has-political-correctness-killed-tv-comedy/21193744Did you know that June 12 every year is Superman Day? We're not sure how this particular day came to be dedicated to the Man of Steel, especially since he seems omnipresent in our lives every day. A pop cultural mainstay since 1938, the Krypton-born hero never seems far away, especially in the movies.

Yet while it seems every boy has dreamed of putting on the red cape and flying, the character has been remarkably hard to cast in movies. For every Christopher Reeve, Brandon Routh or Henry Cavill who said yes, many more have said no. Here are 15 potential Kal-El's that never came to be.

1. Sylvester Stallone"Yo, Lois!" After the success of "Rocky," it's no wonder that "Superman: The Movie" producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind considered Stallone to play the Last Son of Krypton. Reportedly, he was deemed too ethnic for the part, though other sources have said that Marlon Brando (who was cast earlier as Superman's father, Jor-El) refused to work with him.

2. Ben AffleckThe future Batman was once Supes. When producer Jon Peters hired Kevin Smith to rewrite the script for proposed 1990s reboot "Superman Lives," the writer-director and comics fan envisioned his "Chasing Amy" star in the lead role. But when Tim Burton was hired to direct, he had Smith's script rewritten and tossed out his casting ideas.

3. Neil DiamondYes, the rumble-voiced crooner was on the short list of performers that the Salkinds considered for Supes, even though he had no acting experience. Diamond reportedly turned down the role when he realized he could make more money if he spent 1977 touring. His "Superman" screen test is lost to history, though it may have sounded like this.

4. Robert RedfordRedford had been playing men of action for a decade (in such movies as "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and "Three Days of the Condor") when the Salkinds approached him to play Superman. But he said no, explaining, "Nobody is going to believe me flying." (He also reportedly balked at the money and the lack of a completed script.)

5. Warren BeattyAsked by the Salkinds to consider playing Superman, "Shampoo" star Beatty got as far as taking the suit home for the weekend. He brought it back on Monday, saying he felt he looked ridiculous, and declined the part.

6. Patrick WayneThe Salkinds actually offered John Wayne's son the role of Superman, but he turned it down to look after his father, then newly diagnosed with stomach cancer. The younger Wayne did go on to star in action films "Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger" and "The People That Time Forgot."

7. Muhammad AliThe boxing champ had no acting experience, but his charisma, physique, fighting skills, and worldwide fan base helped put him on the short list for Warners' first Superman movie. Producer Alexander Salkind was almost ready to cast Ali until Salkind's son, Ilya, pointed out that Ali was black. Ali did manage to appear in the 1978 comic book, "Superman vs. Muhammad Ali." And yes, The Greatest does knock out the Man of Steel.

8. Jon VoightThe "Midnight Cowboy" star was one of many A-listers whom the Salkinds considered to play Clark Kent. Among the others on their list: Voight's "Deliverance" costar Burt Reynolds, Voight's "Midnight Cowboy" costar Dustin Hoffman (who nixed the roles of both Clark Kent and Lex Luthor), Paul Newman (who declined the roles of Superman, Luthor, and Jor-El), Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood.

9. Nicolas CageCage is such a Superfan, he named his son Kal-El. In Tim Burton's aborted "Superman Lives," Cage would have played a revisionist version of the character; he was even fitted for a black-and-silver version of the Superman costume (that lit up!) and cashed a check for $20 million before Warner Bros. scrapped the project.

10. Will SmithAfter Nicolas Cage and Tim Burton dropped out of "Superman Lives," producer Jon Peters tried to resurrect the project with a newly-revised script and offered the role to his "Wild Wild West" star, Smith. Mindful of the backlash he'd received for playing a character who was white on TV, Smith demurred. Years later, Smith recalled: "There is no way I'm playing Superman!' Because I had already done Jim West, and you can't be messing up white people's heroes in Hollywood!" He ended up playing an original screen superhero instead in "Hancock."

11. Josh HartnettUp for the role in two separate films -- Wolfgang Petersen's aborted "Batman vs. Superman" and the "Flyby" project written by J.J. Abrams -- Hartnett walked away from the latter, and a three-picture deal potentially worth $100 million. Directors McG and Bret Ratner were attached to flyby, with Ratner keen on Hartnett but, as the actor would later recall, "The decision was a struggle. But I just never really wanted to play Superman."

12. Ashton KutcherBefore he tried to cast Josh Hartnett, Brett Ratner screen-tested the "Dude, Where's My Car?" star. But Kutcher eventually turned the part down, and Warner Bros' refused to give Ratner the $225 million budget he wanted. When the director dropped out of the project, it went back to its original director, McG, who once again tried to enlist Kutcher. He screen-tested again, this time alongside Keri Russell as Lois Lane. But he still thought he "looked funny" in the Superman suit and declined a second time.

13. Brendan Fraser"The Mummy" star was up for the "Flyby" project as well, and recalled being psyched to try on the suit. He passed however, over concern that he -- like the previous Superman actors -- would suffer the "Superman Curse" and be typecast for the rest of his career.

14. David BoreanazThe "Bones" star had to turn down "Flyby" as it conflicted with his commitment at the time to his TV series, "Angel." Years later, Boreanaz was considered for Zack Snyder's "Man of Steel" before the part went to Henry Cavill.

15. Jude LawThe English heartthrob was one of the actors Brett Ratner approached to star in "Superman: Flyby." He was also in talks to star in Wolfgang Petersen's "Batman vs. Superman," playing Clark Kent to Colin Farrell's Bruce Wayne. But Law demanded script approval over sequels, Petersen left to direct "Troy," and the project fell apart.

]]>2015-06-12T09:00:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/06/12/15-actors-almost-cast-superman/21193292
The third season of the Emmy-winning "Orange Is the New Black" premieres June 12 on Netflix, prompting the question: why aren't there more memorable prison shows on TV?

Granted, we haven't seen many of the acclaimed prison series from other countries, including the beloved 1974-77 Britcom "Porridge," U.K. women's prison drama "Bad Girls" (1999-2006), or the 1970s Aussie soap "Prisoner." Still, this is America, dammit! We have 2.4 million people behind bars. We incarcerate our own at a higher rate than any other country on Earth. Surely, when it comes to creating TV about life in the big house, we can do better. But until we do, you can satisfy your craving for convict capers by watching these series set in the stir. ]]>2015-06-12T08:00:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/06/12/best-prison-tv-shows/21192390"Spy" should have been more of a sure thing at the box office.

The film, which reunites Melissa McCarthy with her "Bridesmaids" and "The Heat" director, Paul Feig, entered the weekend with good buzz, great reviews and modest competition. Pundits guessed it would open as high as $35-40 million.

Its actual opening, estimated at $30.0 million and good for first place, is nothing to sneeze at. Still, a debut that's as much as $10 million off expectations for such a seemingly can't-miss movie has to rate somewhere between disappointing and troubling.

"Spy's" underperformance wasn't the only ominous sign at the box office. Horror prequel "Insidious: Chapter 3" opened on the low end of expectations, premiering in third place with an estimated $23.0 million. "Entourage," which started out strong with a mid-week Wednesday opening of $5.7 million, was supposed to make $17 to $20 million over the weekend -- not bad for a poorly-reviewed, R-rated adaptation of the HBO series that went off the air four years ago. But the continued adventures of Vinnie Chase and his "Bro-pack" eventually underwhelmed, debuting in fourth place with an estimated $10.4 million for the weekend. (Its five-day take is estimated at $17.8 million.)

Overall, the box office was down 4.4 percent from last week -- which in turn was down 10.3 percent from the weekend before, which declined 16.4 percent from the weekend before that. These declines come as the numbers from May reveal a box office that's 17.7 percent behind last year. That's despite such huge May 2015 hits as "Avengers: Age of Ultron," "Pitch Perfect 2," and "San Andreas." Then again, even "Ultron" didn't open as big as it was supposed to or maintain the momentum of the previous "Avengers." (At this point in its run, 2012's "The Avengers" had earned $577.9 million, $139.9 million more than "Ultron.")

If this trend keeps up, the summer box office will end up $718 million behind last summer's $4.1 billion take. That would be a disaster for an industry whose bread and butter is summer earnings, particularly from big-budget spectacles that are about all Hollywood knows how to market anymore.

What's behind the unenthusiastic response to this summer's movies? Here are five conclusions the studios can draw from the summer so far.

1. You Can't Count on Star PowerMcCarthy has done well in the past as part of an ensemble, or paired with at least one other star who's a current draw (Sandra Bullock, for example). But on her own? Not so much. Last summer's "Tammy" did earn some $84.5 million overall, but it was all McCarthy's show, and it didn't earn the dollars or the reviews that her teamwork movies have.

Similarly, "Tomorrowland" boasted George Clooney's best opening in years, but his name alone wasn't enough to sell the movie across the board. Neither was Reese Witherspoon (or Sofia Vergara, the highest-paid actress on TV) for "Hot Pursuit." About the only stars who've helped sell tickets this summer are Anna Kendrick ("Pitch Perfect 2") and Dwayne Johnson ("San Andreas"), and both were relentless in promoting their movies on TV and in social media.

2. You Can't Count on Counter-programmingFor months, this column has argued that counter-programming is no longer an effective strategy, whether you're putting out a female-driven film on a weekend where a male-driven movie is expected to dominate, or vice versa.

Certainly, guys weren't drawn to the testosterone-heavy "Entourage" just because "Spy" has a female lead. In a way, this is actually good news. After all, "Spy," "San Andreas," and "Ultron" have succeeded in part because they appealed to both men and women. There have been a lot of (justified) complaints about Hollywood sexism in recent months, complaints about the relative lack of work for women both in front of and behind the camera, but at least the industry is starting to wake up to the fact that women buy movie tickets, too, and maybe it would be a good idea to take their tastes into account.

3. Moviegoers Have Short Memories"Mad Max: Fury Road" had some of the best reviews of the year, featuring stars Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron, and was a big-budget action spectacle meant to appeal to men and women alike. It's earned a pretty good $130.8 million in four weeks. But it must have disappointed any industry observers who expected it to do better because it was based on a familiar franchise. After all, the last installment was 30 years ago, with another male lead. (What was his name, again?)

Similarly, no one went to see "Poltergeist" ($44.5 million in three weeks) just because it's a reboot of a horror classic from 33 years ago; indeed, any moviegoer old enough to have fond memories of the original film or its 1980s sequels was likely disappointed with the new version. Hollywood has a tendency to mine any known title for the sake of a little brand familiarity, but after a certain number of years, that doesn't matter to young moviegoers who don't revere the original, nor to old moviegoers who fear their fond memories will be tarnished by the updated version. Which is one of the few clouds on the horizon for next week's "Jurassic World," a franchise reboot that comes 14 years after the previous installment.

4. The "Originality" ProblemAudiences say they're tired of retreads and sequels, but when an original movie like "Hot Pursuit," "Tomorrowland," or "Aloha" hits theaters, viewers don't show up -- or, in the case of "Spy," don't show up in droves as expected.

Pundits have seen these results as a sign that original movies don't work, but they're really just a sign that original movies don't work if they're not well-made or well-marketed. "San Andreas," derivative as it is, did fine. Hopes remain high for upcoming original films "Inside Out" (the Pixar name should be enough to sell it) and Amy Schumer's much-buzzed comedy "Trainwreck." And it's worth noting that some of this summer's most successful (or most likely to succeed) sequels -- "Ted 2," "Magic Mike XXL," "Minions" -- are from franchises that started out as original films. The sequels should work just as well as the first installments did -- if they're properly executed, and if marketers don't drop the ball.

5. AnticipationSome pundits theorize that moviegoers are staying home until the premieres of the films they really want to see -- next weekend's "Jurassic World," perhaps, or "Inside Out" on June 19. Until then, they're saving their money. Why blow your comedy dollar on "Spy" if you can see "Ted 2" in three weeks? Or why see "Poltergeist" when "Insidious: Chapter 3" is opening two weeks later? That seems to be the argument, though "Poltergeist" opened almost as big as "Insidious," with $22.6 million, before dropping like a rock in the two weekends since.

In the end, it should just be as simple as making movies people actually want to see, and getting the word out about them to drum up interest. There just haven't been many movies so far this summer that people wanted to see as much as they wanted to see last year's "Maleficent," "X-Men: Days of Future Past," and "Godzilla." At least two of those films were well-made, and all of them were well-marketed. This summer still has three months left to go. CGI dinosaurs and CGI potty-mouthed teddy bears may be enough to make up for May slackness, but if not, Hollywood had better cross its fingers that it has more to offer this summer that will entice viewers out of their living rooms. ]]>2015-06-08T06:00:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/06/08/hollywood-summer-box-office-disaster/21191653 Think of your summer leisure time -- beaches, baseball, barbecues, vacations, camping, fairs, fireworks, sunshine... What can the TV programmers offer to pull you away from all that?

Seems counterintuitive, right? And yet, that's what this summer's TV fare looks like, a parade of grimness and bleakness at a time when people are most likely to seek escapism.

This year's summer of darkness began with the launch on Fox last month of "Wayward Pines," the new series based on Blake Crouch''s novels and featuring the signature spooky touch of "Sixth Sense" and "Signs" director M. Night Shyamalan. So far, the show's highlights have included vehicular mayhem, cultish creepiness, mysterious conspiracies, summary executions, and hints of lurking monsters.

Not to be outdone, NBC has "Aquarius," with David Duchovny putting on his Fox "Creepy" Mulder hat as a 1960s sleuth who crosses paths with a Charles Manson who has yet to descend completely into madness and multiple murders. (Notice how, whenever they make a show or movie about the 1960s that's not "The Wonder Years," it's never about peace and love and music and civil rights victories, it's always about war and social unrest and drugs and hippie excesses?)

And over on ABC, they have "The Whispers," based loosely on Ray Bradbury's story "Zero Hour," a drama series in which an alien presence persuades children to try to kill their parents. The pilot, which aired on Monday, was co-directed by Mark Romanek, the filmmaker behind such art-house chillers as "One Hour Photo" and "Never Let Me Go."

Even on the supposedly benign ABC Family channel, there's the new "Stitchers," about a woman who helps solve murders by mind-melding with the dead victims. Apparently, conspiracy drama "Pretty Little Liars" (which started as a summer series on the channel) didn't bring enough darkness to a channel otherwise known for "Gilmore Girls" reruns and Harry Potter marathons.

Coming soon: SyFy's "Dark Matter" (June 12), about a group of suspicious amnesiacs aboard a lost spaceship and "Killjoys " (June 19); a gritty drama from the producers of "Orphan Black" about interstellar bounty hunters; AMC's "The Making of the Mob: New York" (June 15), a documentary series about the violent history of organized crime in America, and "Humans" (June 28); a "Blade Runner"-like sci-fi series about a society too dependent on replicant servants; TNT's "Proof" (June 16), starring Jennifer Beals as a surgeon and grieving mom who searches for evidence of life after death; USA's "Complications," (June 18), another show about a doctor who's also a grieving parent; Sundance's "Deutschland 83 (June 17); a Cold War undercover spy drama that sounds like a West German version of "The Americans"; MTV's "Scream" (June 30), based on the old slasher-movie franchise; and CBS's "Zoo" (June 30), based on the James Patterson tale about a worldwide pandemic of animal attacks on humans. Even HBO's new comedy "The Brink" (June 21) is a "Dr. Strangelove"-like satire about well-placed diplomats and servicemen trying to prevent World War III. And those are just the new series debuting in June.

When did sunny-season TV get so dark? Part of the answer has to do with the changing nature of summer TV -- a season that didn't even exist 25 years ago, back when there were only four broadcast networks that followed a decades-old tradition of airing new programming from September to May and reruns during the warm-weather months when no one seemed to be watching. That all changed in the early 1990s, with the summer success of CBS's gentle dramedy "Northern Exposure" and Fox's sunny-California teen soap "Beverly Hills, 90210." From then on, summer seemed to be an ideal time to launch low-key escapist fare. When the reality boom hit in the early 2000s, summer saw the successful launches of CBS's "Survivor" and "Big Brother" and Fox's "American Idol."

But the success of these summer series made TV programmers realize that the old September-to-May schedule was an anachronism. If there was no longer a time when viewers didn't hunger for new programming, then you could launch a new series at any time of year. So there was an increased demand for new programming of all kinds, not just breezy comedies, light dramas, and fun reality competition series.

In recent summers, in addition to "Pretty Little Liars," we've seen such series as HBO's gory and apocalyptic vampire drama "True Blood" (a summer show for all but the first of its seven seasons), FX's envelope-pushing comedy "Louie" (known for its dark and intense exploration of topics TV would usually rather avoid), and AMC's "Mad Men" (which premiered in July, 2007) and "Breaking Bad" (which didn't take off until it became a summer series in its fourth season, in 2011). On the networks, CBS has offered Stephen King adaptation "Under the Dome" and chilling sci-fi drama "Extant," both of which are returning this summer.

Even so, why are we watching these shows when we could be frolicking outside? It could be that years of acclaimed antihero dramas on both cable and network TV have primed us to accept brooding, intense dramas and darkly satirical comedies year-round. (Exhibit A: AMC's "Halt and Catch Fire," which looks at the dawn of the personal computer industry through the psychodramas of the tortured souls whose demons helped drive their innovations. Despite modest ratings, the series -- and its enigmatic, charismatic Don Draper-like protagonist, played by Lee PaceI -- returned for a second season on Sunday.) It could be that we're so accustomed to violent and spooky fare, from "Hannibal" to "The Walking Dead," from "American Horror Story" to "Game of Thrones," that our hunger for such shows does not diminish during the summer. Have the networks, which have all but abandoned comedy for the upcoming fall season, decided that it's too hard to figure out how to make viewers laugh in these sensitive times? Or could it be that our own lives are so dramatic and stressful, that the world brought to us by the news is so chaotic and ominous, that even shows this horrific seem to us like cathartic escapism?

Whatever the reason, we're going to be stuck with this gloom and doom on TV until fall, when we'll get... more of the same. Oh, well. At least we can turn to such light and fluffy entertainment as the new seasons of "Orange Is the New Black" and "True Detective." Oh, wait...
]]>2015-06-05T12:00:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/06/05/when-did-summer-tv-get-so-grim/21189265Everyone complains that Hollywood doesn't make original movies anymore, but when the studios actually do, they don't always know how to sell them. That was the lesson of "Tomorrowland" last weekend, and it's the source of this weekend's cautionary box office tale involving two more original wide-release movies, "San Andreas" and "Aloha."

Neither movie got very good reviews, but "San Andreas" was generally considered a sure thing, while "Aloha" was expected to disappoint. In fact, "San Andreas" opened on top with an estimated $53.0 million, well above the $35-to-$40 million pundits had predicted. Conversely, "Aloha" debuted in sixth place with an estimated $10.0 million, at the bottom end of its meager $10-$13 million expectations.

Though one is a big-budget disaster movie and the other a mid-budget romantic dramedy, the two films had a lot more in common than you might think. And yet, those elements proved an asset to one and a detriment to the other. Turns out these things matter -- except when they suddenly don't. No wonder predictions for both films were so far off.

Here's what each movie had going for it -- or against it.

Star power. "San Andreas" and "Aloha" both feature A-list male leads coming off the biggest hits of their careers -- "Furious 7" for Dwayne Johnson and "American Sniper" for Bradley Cooper. Of course, the disaster movie is a perfect fit for Johnson's action-hero résumé. Three-time Oscar nominee Cooper is a more versatile actor, but maybe his strong identification with "Sniper" hurt him with audiences who have a hard time seeing such an intense dramatic actor play a low-key romantic lead. (He hasn't really played this sort of part too often, and even in "Silver Linings Playbook," he was more intense than charming or funny.) That's not a knock on Cooper's performance, just an observation that The Rock has made a career out of satisfying audience expectations, while Cooper routinely defies them.

The fact that "Aloha" also has Emma Stone and Rachel McAdams -- and that neither of them helped sell tickets -- seems further proof that stardom doesn't matter that much at the box office. Paradoxically, "San Andreas" shouldn't have needed any star power at all; disaster movies are all about the spectacle of destruction, not the actors dwarfed by the spectacle. And yet, if Johnson weren't the star, "San Andreas" probably would have made just the $35 to $40 million that observers had predicted.

Female appeal. "Aloha" was thought to be strong counterprogramming to "San Andreas." After all, it's a romance with a handsome leading man and a spunky-everygirl leading lady (Emma Stone). Indeed, Sony exit polling showed an audience for "Aloha" that was 64 percent women. But "San Andreas" wasn't the macho action fest that Sony might have wanted as competition. Exit polling by Warner Bros. revealed an audience that was 51 percent female. Indeed, Johnson seems to appeal to women as much as he does to men, which is one reason for the success of his "Fast and Furious" installments. Plus, "Aloha" had to go up against several other recent releases with strong appeal to women, including "Pitch Perfect 2" (No. 2 this week with an estimated $14.8 million), feminist action epic "Mad Max: Fury Road" (No. 4 with an estimated $13.6 million), and even "The Avengers: Age of Ultron" (at No. 5 in its fifth weekend, still pulling in an estimated $10.9 million, for a slight edge over "Aloha" that may vanish when final figures are released on Monday).

Older audience appeal. "Aloha" is certainly a movie for grown-ups, and Sony polling found 57 percent of its audience to be over the age of 30. But "San Andreas" pulled in older moviegoers in even bigger numbers, with 70 percent of its audience over age 25. With both films competing for the same ticketbuyers, "Aloha" didn't really stand a chance.

Director with a track record. Not that "San Andreas" shooter Brad Peyton has much of one. It's only his third major release, after the "Cats & Dogs" sequel and the "Journey to the Center of the Earth" sequel. Still, the latter movie proved that he and Johnson can make hits together. Plus, all three of his wide releases have been in 3D, which turned out to be a huge plus this time. "San Andreas" made 44 percent of its earnings from 3D screenings, which is a high fraction these days for a 3D movie.

"Aloha" writer/director Cameron Crowe has a track record, too, but it's a lot more mixed. He specializes in thoughtful romances, though it's been a long time since his biggest hits. "Jerry Maguire" was 19 years ago and "Vanilla Sky" 14 years ago. (Yes, "Say Anything" and "Almost Famous" are modern classics, but they weren't box office hits.) A decade ago, he flopped with "Elizabethtown" (a film with a similar plot to that of "Aloha"), and while he had a modest hit four years ago with family dramedy "We Bought a Zoo," it was anyone's guess whether or not he'd be able to return to the good graces of audiences and critics this time out.

At any rate, he's no longer a name that sells tickets. Neither is the obscure Peyton. So all that mattered was whether they could deliver on screen. Which brings us to...

Disregard for critics. Disaster movies seldom appeal to critics. The stories tend to be thin and the characters even thinner. But they're also critic-proof; audiences find them escapist and cathartic. That was certainly true this time with "San Andreas," which got mixed reviews but received an A- grade at CinemaScore, indicating very good word-of-mouth among ticketbuyers.

Reviews do matter, however, for grown-up, character-driven movies like "Aloha," and unfortunately, they were almost uniformly terrible. It didn't help that Sony didn't screen the film for critics until Tuesday, three days before it opened, a tactic that critics often see as a sign that the studio isn't expecting positive reviews. Given the late screenings and Crowe's lackluster recent track record, it's possible that there was some reflexive groupthink going on here. But audiences haven't responded well either, giving the movie a B- grade at CinemaScore, a sign of weak word-of-mouth.

Setting. Moviegoers have shelled out to see Los Angeles destroyed by earthquakes, aliens, even volcanoes for at least the last four decades (since Charlton Heston, the Rock of 1974, saved Angelenos from Sensurround vibrations in "Earthquake"). Maybe there's some schadenfreude involved. Maybe it's just Hollywood externalizing its own self-loathing. Or maybe, with all the real tremors, mudslides, wildfires, droughts, and other catastrophes inflicted upon southern California, waiting for the Big One isn't that far-fetched a disaster-movie premise. In any case, "San Andreas" is just the latest film in a successful pattern.

You'd think Hawaii would make a scenic enough setting to ensure the success of "Aloha," but here, the setting backfired, earning the movie a wave of bad press from Asian-American activists who decried the movie for whitewashing the island state with a predominantly caucasian cast. (Why there weren't similar complaints a few years ago for "The Descendants" is a mystery, but at least some of those characters were fully aware of their status as relative carpetbaggers and colonialists.) True, there were probably few potential moviegoers who were aware of the controversy and fewer still who let it dissuade them from buying tickets. But it couldn't have helped.

Simple title. At least the title "San Andreas" tells you exactly what you're getting: an earthquake disaster movie set in California. The title "Aloha" tells you you're getting a movie set in Hawaii, but beyond that, what it promises is ambiguous. Again, it all comes down to marketing. Looks like both films delivered on the promise of their titles.
]]>2015-06-01T12:30:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/06/01/san-andreas-vs-aloha-a-cautionary-box-office-tale/21188675 Remember when they used to call TLC "The Learning Channel"? Well, the scandal that's blown up during the last week surrounding TLC's "19 Kids and Counting" seems like it ought to be a teachable moment, but it's unclear if anyone will be learning the right lessons.

Indeed, even as sponsors desert the show (nine of them at this writing), even as Hulu yanks its reruns from streaming, TLC has yet to cancel the series. In fact, the channel is still mulling a spinoff featuring Jessa and Jill Duggar and their husbands. Apparently, there's no brand so tainted that it doesn't have at least a little life left to leverage.

This marks TLC's second reality-related child molestation scandal in less than a year, after the channel yanked "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo" when Mama June Shannon allegedly rekindled a relationship with a convicted sex offender who, grown daughter Anna Cardwell claims, assaulted her when she was a girl. Does this mean TLC will be more careful in the future about vetting its reality stars? Probably not. After all, the genre depends on finding unusual, colorful people to put before the cameras.

If TLC was still pretending to have an educational mission, it could even claim there's something educational about exposing viewers to the lives of unconventional people. Say what you will about the Duggars, or Mama June and her daughters, or the Robertsons of A&E's "Duck Dynasty," for that matter: at least they're not the kind of people you see on TV all the time.

On scripted TV, characters tend to be city dwellers or suburbanites, middle class or wealthy, well-educated, professional, secular, youthful, able-bodied, attractive -- people much like TV writers (except for the attractive part). We seldom see people who are rural or poor, people who are much bigger or smaller than the ideal body type, people who are old or physically challenged, or people who wear their religious beliefs on their sleeves. But these are the very people who make up a sizable percentage of reality stars.

Like the rest of American culture, TV has never been comfortable talking about class, or about the rural/urban divide, or about religion, or about any trait that challenges the American notion that we can all live comfortable middle-class lives if we just play by the rules. It used to be that real people whose lives contradicted that notion were considered freaks who were relegated to the sideshows of daytime TV, on confrontational talk shows like Jerry Springer's or Geraldo Rivera's or Ricki Lake's. Today, however, such people get not 15 minutes of fame but a whole season (or several) on reality TV.

But we don't watch these shows because we genuinely want to learn about the lives of people different from ourselves. We watch because we're voyeurs peeping in our neighbors' windows. We watch, not to see how such people succeed in life despite their challenges, but to see how they fail. There was actually a study done back in 2003, at the University of Missouri at Columbia, whose findings suggested that people enjoy reality TV because -- well, not exactly out of schadenfreude, but rather relief that they're not suffering the travails of the people on screen, a sense of "There but for the grace of God go I."

The latest show to capitalize on this feeling among viewers is "The Briefcase," the CBS series that debuted this week. It's being sold as uplifting, a look at how generous and selfless people can be even when they're in dire financial straits. But in practice, the show seems to pit two needy families against each other, with each offered a $101,000 windfall and told to keep or give away to the other family as much as they see fit, with the gimmick being that neither family is aware that they've both been offered an identical briefcase full of cash. You wouldn't be alone in finding this sort of spectacle to be cruel and gladiatorial. (As New York magazine's Vulture pointed out, CBS chief Les Moonves could fill both briefcases with less than a day's worth of his annual salary, but what would the entertainment value be in that?).

Here at last, we have people on TV who might be called poor, who might have been middle class once but fell into debt -- and we pit them against each other in a contest to see who is most morally fit to get out of debt. (Where's the moral test for the rich and powerful folks who sent their jobs overseas or who sent them off to be maimed on the battlefield?) Is this show supposed to be educational and inspirational, or does it just reinforce stereotypes that poor people are poor because of some moral failing? Oh, and a question for the show's sponsors: Do you really think that consumers who spend an hour watching people agonize over money are going to be eager to drop disposable income on your products?

In a way, "The Briefcase" is an apt match with CBS's "Undercover Boss," which plays on the viewers' unspoken assumption that it's CEOs and not the rank and file who are reaping all the benefits of increased worker productivity, but which also doesn't question how the system came to be rigged that way, or what could be done to change it. Viewers are supposed to be moved by how grateful the workers are for small favors and not question why they appear so downtrodden in the first place. Miraculously, "Undercover Boss" has persisted for six years, even though you'd think employees would be wise to the sudden appearance of a mysterious new co-worker and a camera crew. Similarly, it's hard to see how "The Briefcase" could last beyond a season, once everyone is aware of its deception, but if "Undercover Boss" can do it, who knows?

One paradox is that, if reality TV perpetuates the notion that people are poor because they deserve to be, then it also presents rich people who by no means deserve their good fortune. Think of the various "Real Housewives" cast members and whose wealth routinely fails to bring them happiness. Yes, these shows do expose us to people unlike ourselves (the rich, like the poor, really are different from you and me), but if there's any educational value here, it's in learning that you wouldn't want rich people's problems, either.

And as long as we do, reality TV isn't going to become any more enlightening or less exploitative. As a recent Atlantic article makes clear, the makers of these shows rely on the audience to tell them where the limits of acceptable spectacle lie. Viewer outrage kept "Jersey Shore" from showing promised footage of Snooki getting sucker-punched in the face. But viewers of the "Bachelor" were OK with Jason Mesnick dumping fiancée Melissa Rycroft on camera and proposing to runner-up Molly Malaney instead. Ratings and social media response seem to be the only guidelines the networks have for how much they can get away with. They're depending on us to be their conscience. Judging by the fact that TLC still, after a week of viewer disgust and advertiser defections, hasn't pulled the plug on "19 Kids and Counting" suggests that we viewers aren't doing our job forcefully enough to make a difference.
]]>2015-05-29T14:00:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/05/29/has-reality-tv-reached-the-tipping-point/21187387Lifetime's mini-series "The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe" debuts on May 30, prompting the question: What possible secrets can there still be about Marilyn Monroe?

Quite a few, apparently, from the identity of her birth father, to the nature of her fatal overdose at age 36 -- was it suicide, accident, or murder? In 2012, on the 50th anniversary of her death, Moviefone previously published "25 Things You Didn't Know About Marilyn Monroe." Turns out that list barely scratched the surface. Here, then, are 25 more.

1. Monroe's birth certificate from 1926 lists her birth name as Norma Jeane Mortenson. The last name was a misspelling of the surname of her mother's second husband, Martin Mortensen, who separated from Gladys before she became pregnant. Soon after, she reverted to her first married name, Baker, and gave that name to her daughter.

2. Gladys later told Norma Jeane that her father was Gladys' boss, Charles Gifford, who looked like Clark Gable in the snapshot that Gladys showed her. Monroe never met him and never knew for certain who her father was.

3. Gladys Baker was a film cutter at Consolidated Film Industries, a Hollywood film lab. Believing herself to be incapable of raising the child, she left Norma Jeane with various foster families. More than once, the girl lived with Gladys's friend, Grace McKee. For a time, she even lived in the Los Angeles Orphans' Home, as a ward of the state.

4. When Norma Jeane was seven, Gladys bought a house and brought the girl to live with her. But within a few months, the mother suffered a nervous breakdown and was institutionalized.

5. Gladys had a history of suicidal depression in her family. Both her brother and grandmother had killed themselves.

6. In her memoir, Monroe claimed she had been sexually abused by several different people during her years in foster care. One of the abusers, she said, was the son of a great-aunt she lived with for a while. Another, she said, was Ervin "Doc" Goddard, the man Grace McKee married during one of Monroe's stays at her home.

7. In 1942, when Monroe was 16, Doc Goddard got a job in West Virginia. He and McKee were either unwilling or unable to take the girl with her when they moved. Rather than let her become a ward of the state again, they arranged for her to marry a neighbor, James Doughterty, who was 21.

8. During World War II, while James Dougherty was serving in the Merchant Marine, his wife was working in the Radioplane factory in Van Nuys, where her duties included inspecting parachutes and coating airplane parts with fire-retardant spray.

9. The official story of Norma Jeane Dougherty's discovery, put forth by Monroe's estate, had her walking down Sunset Boulevard in the summer of 1944, when the 18-year-old was spotted by photographer Bruno Bernard, a.k.a. pin-up pioneer Bernard of Hollywood, who gave her his business card and offered to take some test shots, insisting that he'd be "strictly professional." But it's not clear that he took any pictures of her before the fateful 1947 session at the Palm Springs Racquet Club, where she was to meet talent agent Johnny Hyde. By that time, she'd already been a pin-up for a couple of years and had already signed her first movie contract.

10. We may have Ronald Reagan to thank for Monroe's entry into modeling and show business. In June 1945, the actor and future U.S. president was a captain in the Army's 1st Motion Picture Unit, doing publicity and propaganda work. He ordered photographer David Conover to visit the Radioplane factory to shoot pictures of pretty girls contributing to the war effort. He was particularly struck by the beauty of the 19-year-old Norma Jeane Dougherty. She told him of her desire to become an actress, and he offered to take portfolio shots of her. He spent two weeks showing her how to pose and how to woo the camera. He also encouraged her to sign with the Blue Book Modeling Agency, where she was advised to dye her brown hair blonde.

11. By 1946, she was calling herself Marilyn Monroe. "Marilyn" supposedly came from 1920s performer Marilyn Miller, while Monroe was Gladys Baker's maiden name. 20th Century Fox talent scout Ben Lyon, who had seen Norma Jeane Dougherty's pin-ups and signed her to the studio, is generally credited with coming up with the stage name, whose "MM" alliteration he thought would be good luck.

12. Paradoxically, the actress' legal name became Marilyn Miller once she wed playwright Arthur Miller. She used that legal name as an alias when she visited doctors.

13. Monroe filed for divorce from her first husband in 1946, while he was still overseas. He claimed her reason for the divorce was that Fox wouldn't sign her unless she was single. ("They didn't want a pregnant starlet," she explained.)

14. A decade later, at the height of her stardom, Dougherty would anger his ex-wife by claiming in a magazine interview that she once threatened to kill herself by jumping off the Santa Monica Pier if he left her. Her version of the story was that she'd threatened suicide out of boredom.

15. People were surprised when Monroe, who had been married for nine months to Yankees legend Joe DiMaggio, married the intellectual Miller in 1956, but she was well-read. She had studied literature at UCLA and had a library of 400 books in her home, many of them first editions.

16. "Bus Stop" director Joshua Logan was impressed enough with Monroe to recall later that working with her was "the first time I learned that intelligence and, yes, brilliance, have nothing to do with education."17. "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" co-star and fellow bombshell Jane Russell tried to proselytize Monroe. The actress later joked, "Jane tried to convert me, and I tried to introduce her to Freud."

18. Monroe's billowing white dress from "The Seven Year Itch" was not her only famous movie costume. Tommy Hilfiger bought her jeans from "River of No Return" at an auction for $37,000. He gave them as a gift to Britney Spears.

19. The glittering Jean Louis gown she wore during her rendition of "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" at John F. Kennedy's birthday in 1962 was so skin-tight that she had to be sewn into it. In 1999, it was sold at auction for $1.3 million.

20. Monroe was infamous in Hollywood for being chronically late to movie sets and struggling with her lines. These problems apparently stemmed from her crippling insecurity that no one would take her seriously as an actress. Billy Wilder, who directed her twice (in "The Seven Year Itch" and "Some Like It Hot"), insisted that all the trouble she caused was worth it, given the results. "I have an Aunt Minnie who's very punctual," Wilder said, "but who would pay to see Aunt Minnie?"

21. "Some Like It Hot" co-star Jack Lemmon recalled decades later that nothing seemed to help Monroe remember her lines. Cue cards would be placed all over the set, outside camera range, even inside a drawer Monroe had to open in one scene. Yet it still look Wilder dozens of takes to get Monroe to deliver the lines as written. But when the daily rushes were screened, Lemmon recalled, something magical would happen. No matter what she was saying, the camera would capture a sparkling performance that the human eye had missed. She knew better than anyone how to act for the camera.

22. When Monroe's "The Misfits" co-star Clark Gable suffered a fatal heart attack at age 59 shortly after the shoot ended, Monroe blamed herself. She cited the stress she caused through her delay-generating behavior throughout the shoot. (Then again, Gable's insistence on doing his own stunts and his crash diet during the shoot may have been contributing factors.) Between the loss of Gable and the dissolution of her marriage to Miller, Monroe became so despondent that she nearly jumped out the 13th-story window of her Manhattan apartment in early 1961.

23. Alarmed by her depression, her psychiatrist committed her to the Payne Whitney clinic at Cornell University-New York Hospital. To her horror, Monroe had found herself institutionalized -- just like her mother. She managed to track down ex-husband DiMaggio, called him from the psychiatric ward and begged him to come spring her -- which he did. The two reportedly rekindled their relationship, and she was even supposedly planning to remarry him until her fatal overdose, which happened a few days before the August 1962 wedding date.

25. Monroe's estate continues to use her image to work marketing magic. There's a line of Marilyn Monroe fashions at Macy's, a string of Marilyn Monroe beauty spas in various cities, Burton snowboards bearing her likeness, and a Marilyn Moments app for iPhones that lets users create their own Monroe-themed memes using portraits and quotations from the actress.
]]>2015-05-29T10:00:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/05/29/marilyn-monroe-facts/21185950It's fitting that Clint Eastwood and John Wayne both have the same birthday week. (Wayne, who died in 1979, was born May 26, 1907, while Eastwood turns 85 on May 31). After all, these two all-American actors' careers span the history of that most American of movie genres, the western.

Both iconic actors were top box office draws for decades, both seldom stretched from their familiar personas, and both played macho, conservative cowboy heroes who let their firearms do most of the talking. Each represented one of two very different strains of western, the traditional and the revisionist.

As a birthday present to Hollywood's biggest heroes of the Wild West, here are the top 57 westerns you need to see.

57. 'Meek's Cutoff' (2010)Indie filmmaker Kelly Reichardt and her frequent leading lady, Michelle Williams, are the talents behind this sparse, docudrama about an 1845 wagon train whose Oregon Trail journey goes horribly awry. It's an intense story of survival that happens to note the marginalized role of women in the patriarchal Old West. Worth seeking out.

56. 'El Topo' (1970)
Alejandro Jodorowsky's surreal, psychedelic tale virtually invented both the acid western and the midnight-movie cult hit. The director himself plays the messianic title character, a mystical gunslinger who seems to anticipate the characters Clint Eastwood will play in "High Plains Drifter" and "Pale Rider." Imagine a Sergio Leone spaghetti western with the circus atmosphere of a Fellini movie, the surrealism of a Bunuel or David Lynch picture, and the transgressive outrage of an early John Waters movie, and you'll have an idea of what Jodorowsky accomplished here.

55. 'The Great Train Robbery' (1903)
Edwin S. Porter's pioneering film is one of the very first westerns. It ends with the famous, influential, still-shocking shot of a gunman aiming his pistol right at the viewer and opening fire.

54. 'Way Out West' (1937)
In one of the earliest western spoofs, Laurel and Hardy are tasked with delivering a mine deed to an heiress, a task they screw up epically and hilariously.

53. 'The Professionals' (1966)
Lee Marvin and Burt Lancaster star in this twisty, noir-like tale of four mercenaries hired to rescue a rancher's kidnapped wife, only to find more than they bargained for once they find her. It's the "Out of the Past" of westerns.

52. 'One-Eyed Jacks' (1961)
The only movie Marlon Brando ever directed is a gritty, Freudian, dreamlike gloss on the Pat Garrett/Billy the Kid legend. Brando stars as a young outlaw, whose much older partner (frequent Brando co-star Karl Malden) has abandoned and betrayed him and gone straight. Brando the storyteller plays up the Oedipal tensions as the two men head toward the inevitable showdown.

51. 'Silverado' (1985)
The western had been essentially dormant as a genre for a decade when Lawrence Kasdan tried to revive it with this deliberate throwback to the classics. A disparate quartet of cowboys (Scott Glenn, Kevin Kline, Danny Glover, and an unusually animated Kevin Costner) unite against a corrupt sheriff (Brian Dennehy). Any western that can find room to cast John Cleese, Linda Hunt, and Jeff Goldblum is, by definition, going to be pretty fascinating.

50. 'Johnny Guitar' (1954)
Sterling Hayden plays the title troubadour, but Nicholas Ray's unique, lurid western is all about the women. Joan Crawford is the saloon-keeper with a past, and Mercedes McCambridge is the bitter local who bears a murderous grudge against her.

49. 'El Mariachi (1992)'
Robert Rodriguez' debut film, famously made for just $6,000, is a brilliantly staged spaghetti-western homage about an aspiring troubadour (Carlos Gallardo) in a picturesque village who gets mixed up in a bloody crime war and becomes a lethal gunslinger instead . Rodriguez had a bigger budget and bigger stars (Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek) in the two sequels ("Desperado" and "Once Upon a Time in Mexico"), but this one is still the most fun.

48. 'The Big Country' (1958)
Gregory Peck stars in this sweeping saga as a tenderfoot from Maryland who becomes embroiled in a feud between two powerful ranching families. Charlton Heston co-stars as a rowdy ranch hand and romantic rival (they both love Carroll Baker), and it's a treat to watch these two masters of the clenched-jaw school of Hollywood movie acting confront each other.

47. 'Jeremiah Johnson' (1972)
Sydney Pollack's based-in-fact drama stars Robert Redford as a fur trapper in the Rockies. Like Pollack and Redford's later "Out of Africa," it's the story of an immigrant who's a bit out of his depth dealing with the difficulties of the local terrain, the climate, and an uneasy coexistence with the natives. The scenery is stunning; it's no wonder Redford fell in love with Utah.

46. 'The Gunfighter' (1950)
Gregory Peck is Jimmy Ringo, a fast-draw artist who tries to settle down and enjoy a peaceful life. But he can't escape his reputation and is sought out by enemies and young gunslingers trying to make a name for themselves by challenging him. One of the finer examples of this familiar plot.

45. 'The Long Riders' (1980)
The gimmick in Walter Hill's account of the James-Younger gang is that all the characters who were brothers are played by real-life brothers. (Theres the Carradines, the Quaids, the Keaches, and the Guests.) The gimmick works surprisingly well; it makes the history among these outlaws seem a lot more personal.

44. 'The Shootist' (1976)
John Wayne gets a fitting sendoff in his last movie. Playing an old gunslinger dying of cancer, and feeling out of place in the 20th century (it's 1901), he tries to live out his last days in peace and even courts a pretty widow (Lauren Bacall) whose teenage son (Ron Howard) idolizes the old man. But, of course, his past catches up to him -- giving Wayne a chance to go out in a blaze of glory.

43. 'Little Big Man' (1970)
Arthur Penn's movie is the revisionist western to end all revisionist westerns. Dustin Hoffman plays Jack Crabb, a 121-year-old white man who recalls a youth spent living among the Sioux and becoming the only white man to survive Custer's Last Stand. You can read it as an anti-Vietnam War allegory, or just as a colorful story that upends everything you thought you knew about the Old West.

42. 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid' (1973)
Sam Peckinpah's take on the notorious outlaw's pursuit by his former friend was a countercultural allegory back then. Today, it's just a poetic and terribly sad western with top performances by James Coburn (as Garrett), Kris Kristofferson (as Billy), and Slim Pickens as an aging gunfighter. His death scene -- wordless, drawn out, and scored to Bob Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" -- is one of the most haunting and tragic in any western. (Dylan also made his acting debut in the film.)

41. 'Dead Man' (1995)
Jim Jarmusch's unique western is a surreal nightmare. Johnny Depp plays a meek city slicker who receives a fatal bullet wound when mistaken for a gunslinger. Accompanied by a grumbling Indian named Nobody (Gary Farmer), the slowly dying man travels further west, on a quest for spiritual release, through increasingly violent country, until he becomes the bloody desperado everyone thinks he is. Shot in deliberately grainy black-and-white, with a jangly score by Neil Young, it's a black-comic journey into the heart of darkness.

40. 'Rango' (2011)
Johnny Depp stars in this clever animated western spoof. He plays a chameleon who stumbles into a dry desert town populated by anthropomorphic critters, and he's enlisted to drive off some predatory outlaws. With explicit nods to "High Noon," "Chinatown," and Clint Eastwood's spaghetti westerns, "Rango" is a film full of sly references that kids won't get but adults will appreciate.

39. 'Dances With Wolves' (1990)
Kevin Costner won Best Picture and Best Director for his revisionist epic, in which he plays an army lieutenant who comes to respect a tribe of plains Indians so much that he goes native and tries to protect them from his former comrades. It's a sad, sweeping story -- but not without its thrills, like the stirring buffalo hunt sequence.

38. 'Seven Men From Now' (1956)
Director Budd Boetticher made a series of gritty, dark westerns with star Randolph Scott that, like Anthony Mann's work with James Stewart, belies the convention that 1950s westerns were simple black-hat-white-hat morality plays. Here, Scott is a lawman who leaves a bloody trail of revenge on his search for the robbers who killed his wife.

37. 'Winchester '73' (1950)
Anthony Mann made several westerns in the 1950s that revealed a darker, more violent side of James Stewart that must have shocked fans of his aw-shucks persona. This first collaboration is the best. Stewart plays a man bent on avenging his father's death, who tracks a stolen rifle through several owners on his way to finding the killer.

36. 'The Ox-Bow Incident' (1943)
Henry Fonda stars in this stark, compact (just 75 minutes) morality tale about mob justice, playing a cowboy who stumbles onto a lynch mob bent on killing three men who may not actually be guilty. Nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, the film was an inspiration for Fonda's later classic, the jury room drama "12 Angry Men."

35. 'Lone Star' (1996)
In John Sayles' modern-day western, Chris Cooper is a Texas border-town sheriff laboring under the shadow of his late, legendary lawman father (played in flashback by Matthew McConaughey). Probing a 40-year-old murder mystery that involved his father, while also rekindling a romance with an old sweetheart (Elizabeth Pena), he finds out more than he wanted to know about the truth behind his father's legend. The film is a sprawling allegory about life on the border, the way old myths continue to shape our lives, and the uneasy coexistence of many different peoples in the new West.

34. 'Lonely Are the Brave' (1962)
Kirk Douglas' favorites among his own movies. He's a modern-day cowboy and drifter, one who's not at home with the rules, technology, or enclosed spaces of the 20th century. He tries to bust a pal out of jail, but when the friend won't leave, he breaks out himself on a doomed, existential quest for a kind of freedom that's no longer possible in the New West.

33. 'Open Range' (2003)
Best known for its sweeping anamorphic vistas and very grounded approach to shootouts, Kevin Costner both directs and stars in this underrated Western about two cattleman (Costner and Robert Duvall) who find both trouble and purpose when they cross paths with a ruthless land baron (a sinister Michael Gambon). The tense, climatic gunfight -- depicting cowboys as real people who miss and sometimes fumble with their guns -- is a high point, as are Costner's understated direction and performance.

32. 'High Plains Drifter' (1973)
Clint Eastwood's darkest role finds him playing another man with no name (or maybe the same one as before) who offers his protection services to a town awaiting an outlaw onslaught. But his security comes at a price that's more than the town bargained for. Is he an angel, a demon, or just a man with a vindictive sense of humor? Funny, nasty, and bleak.

31. 'The Outlaw Josey Wales' (1976)
One of Clint Eastwood's favorites among hiss own films is this saga of a farmer and Confederate soldier on a long odyssey of revenge against the Union fighters who killed his family, a quest that continues well after the Civil War has already ended. It's a film whose stature has only grown with time.

30. 'Brokeback Mountain' (2005)
Western notions of masculinity are re-examined in Ang Lee's stately tearjerker about a ranch hand (Heath Ledger) and a rodeo rider (Jake Gyllenhaal) who fall in love. Lee's elegant direction and Ledger's laconic performance all but dare viewers to find a reason to consider these two cowboys less than manly just because of who they love.

29. 'Tombstone' (1993)
This isn't the most accurate account of the O.K. Corral gunfight, but it's the most sheerly entertaining, thanks largely to smart casting. Michael Biehn and Powers Boothe are fine villains, Kurt Russell makes a surprisingly good Wyatt Earp, Sam Elliott should be in every western, and Val Kilmer gives the performance of his career as Doc Holliday, a rogue who can get away with anything because he has nothing left to lose. Kudos to whoever groomed the luxuriant mustaches; they're some of the best facial hair in any movie ever.

28. 'Django Unchained' (2012)
Quentin Tarantino's inevitable spaghetti-western homage turned out to be an epic, brutal tale of two bounty hunters (Jamie Foxx and Oscar-winner Christoph Waltz) who target the horrifically cruel plantation owner (Leonardo DiCaprio) who once enslaved Foxx's Django and still has Django's wife (Kerry Washington). Tarantino meant the tale as a corrective to "Birth of a Nation" and a century of cinema that failed to depict American slavery as the absolute horror it was. But since it's Tarantino, it's also a headlong rush of violent adventure.

27. 'True Grit' (2010)
With all due respect to the 1969 original that won John Wayne his only Oscar, the recent Coen brothers remake starring Jeff Bridges as grizzled, one-eyed bounty hunter Rooster Cogburn is the richer film. (It's also more faithful to Charles Portis' novel.) By rights, Bridges should own the movie, but he shares it with Matt Damon's peevish young Texas ranger and all but gives it away to Hailee Steinfeld, as the revenge-driven teen who hires Cogburn to track her father's killer. Even though her longing for vengeance costs her a lifetime of pain, she demonstrates as much true grit as anyone in the movie.

26. 'Destry Rides Again' (1939)
George Marshall's western is almost ridiculously entertaining. James Stewart, in a sly performance, plays a lawman who's reluctant to use his gun, even though he's an expert sharpshooter. Marlene Dietrich (in the performance that Madeline Kahn spoofs in "Blazing Saddles") is the saloon singer who catches his eye. Comedy, music, and all the action you could want.

25. 'My Darling Clementine' (1946)
John Ford's climactic staging of the shootout at the O.K. corral is reportedly very accurate. The movie that precedes that moment is mostly hogwash, but it's well-made hogwash, with Henry Fonda playing Wyatt Earp as the reluctant gunfighter forced to strap on his holster once again, and a shockingly frail Victor Mature as a dying Doc Holliday.

24. 'Fort Apache' (1948)
The first film in John Ford's cavalry trilogy features John Wayne and Henry Fonda clashing as commanders of a garrison under siege. Like the two movies that followed ("She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" and "Rio Grande"), its a fascinating study in styles of leadership and management, as well as a crackling adventure.

23. '3:10 to Yuma' (2007)
James Mangold's remake of the old Glenn Ford-Van Heflin western is actually better than the original. Christian Bale plays the Heflin role of a desperate farmer who agrees to take on the lucrative but hazardous job of escorting a captured criminal (Russell Crowe, in the Ford part) to the train that will take him to prison, with both men aware that the outlaw's gang will stop at nothing to free him. Bale, Crowe, and Mangold turn this simple obstacle course into something epic.

22. 'Ride the High Country' (1962)
Sam Peckinpah's first masterpiece, and Randolph Scott's swan song, is this elegiac western about two aging gunslingers (Scott and Joel McCrea) who have a falling out over the opportunity for one last big score. Like many later revisionist westerns, including several of Peckinpah's own films, this one bears the sense of loss of an old order defined by rules, giving way to a new cruelty where anything goes.

21. 'The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford' (2007)
This unjustly overlooked recent western takes a modern look at the Jesse James legend. Brad Pitt plays the outlaw as a man painfully self-conscious about his own fame. Casey Affleck plays Ford as a frustrated celebrity stalker, one who turns against his idol when his idol worship goes unrequited.

20. 'No Country for Old Men' (2007)
It takes place in the recent past, but the Coen brothers' Best Picture-winning adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel qualifies as a modern-day western. Josh Brolin is the Texan who stumbles onto a fortune, Javier Bardem (who also won an Oscar) is the implacable desperado who tracks him down, and Tommy Lee Jones is the lawman overwhelmed by evil he can't comprehend. Like many westerns, this one laments the passing of the old ways, to be replaced by a new, even more ruthless kind of savagery.

19. 'McCabe and Mrs. Miller' (1971)
Gambler Warren Beatty teams up with madam Julie Christie to open a brothel in a remote frontier town, and all goes well until the big businessmen move in on them. Robert Altman's countercultural parable, complete with a mournful Leonard Cohen soundtrack, doesn't look like any other western, thanks to the snowbound visuals, gorgeously photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond.

18. 'Blazing Saddles' (1974)
Mel Brooks' spoof remains the best western comedy of all time. For all the movie's daring humor (the bean scene!) and racial commentary (Richard Pryor co-wrote the script), it also works as a classic western, one that borrows plot elements from "Rio Bravo" and "Destry Rides Again," with shout-outs to "High Noon," "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," and Randolph Scott.

17. 'She Wore a Yellow Ribbon' (1949)
John Ford's second movie in his Cavalry trilogy (and the only one of the three that's in glorious Technicolor) stars John Wayne as a retiring commander who takes on one last mission, escorting two women to safety while trying to forestall an Indian uprising. Of course, nothing is ever that easy. Ford turns the story into an unforgettable drama of loyalty and regret.

16. 'Lonesome Dove' (1988)
Yes, it was a TV mini-series, not a theatrical film, but it was so good that it deserves a place on this list. Larry McMurtry's tale of two Texas Rangers (Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones) leading a 2,500-mile cattle drive is a classic tale of friendship, adventure, and loss. Anjelica Huston, Diane Lane, and Danny Glover round out an all-star cast.

15. 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' (1969)
Like Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch" the same year, it's easy to see this film about outlaws who draw the wrath of the government in two different countries as a parable of the counterculture vs. the establishment But mostly, it's a fun buddy movie (and an influential one, the first of its kind), one that coasts largely on the immense charm and charisma of the Paul Newman-Robert Redford pairing.

14. 'The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance' (1962)
One of John Ford's final westerns takes a look at the mythmaking he and other western storytellers had been practicing all these years. James Stewart is the city-slicker senator who made his reputation with the killing of the title outlaw (a scary Lee Marvin), and John Wayne is a typical Wayne man of action, one whose ease with violence helps create a civilized society that has no place for a man like himself.

13. 'The Treasure of the Sierra Madre' (1948)
It takes place in Mexico, but it feels like a western -- there's gold prospecting, bandits, murder, and greed. Humphrey Bogart's never been more hard-boiled. John Huston directed his father Walter to a Supporting Actor Oscar as the old prospector who should have known better.

12. 'Red River' (1948)
John Wayne offers a shockingly intense portrayal of obsession as a cowboy leading a lengthy cattle drive through dangerous territory. In his starmaking role, Montgomery Clift is his adopted son, who rebels against Wayne's martinet ways. It's another Howard Hawks movie that explores different varieties of masculinity, and one of the best.

11. 'High Noon' (1952)
Gary Cooper won an Oscar as the marshal who tries and fails to recruit locals to help him defend the town against outlaws who are due to arrive on the midday train. Fred Zinnemann's meticulous direction allows the film to unfold in real time. But the real trick in the script by Carl Foreman, himself a victim of the Hollywood blacklist, is that it can be read as either an anti-communist allegory or an anti McCarthyist allegory. Seen today, stripped of its politics, it's just a terrifically suspenseful thriller and a statement against the dangers of conformity.

10. 'The Magnificent Seven' (1960)
John Sturges wildly successful transposition of Akira Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai" to a western setting stars Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, and Robert Vaughn as members of a team of mercenaries who agree to defend a Mexican town from a bandit (Eli Wallach) and his gang. The film made a movie star of McQueen and embedded Elmer Bernstein's rousing theme music in everyone's DNA; even if you haven't seen the film, you know the melody.

9. 'Shane' (1953)
George Stevens' majestic western looks like a cliche today, but only because it launched so many of them. It's the archetypal movie about a retired gunslinger (Alan Ladd) who wants nothing more than to be a farmhand for homesteader Van Heflin, his wife (Jean Arthur), and their impressionable boy (Brandon de Wilde). But Shane is forced back into action to defend his adopted family against evil (in the form of hired gun Jack Palance). There's a lot going on here, most of it unspoken, from the history of range wars between farmers and ranchers, to Shane's unintentional displacement of Heflin in the affections of the wife and the son. It's also a gorgeously shot film, with Oscar-winning cinematography. By the time the film's over, you'll be echoing de Wilde's admiring child, begging Shane to come back.

8. 'Once Upon a Time in the West' (1968)
After his "Dollars" trilogy, Sergio Leone brought his spaghetti-western sensibility to Hollywood, with striking results. In this epic about a beautiful widow (Claudia Cardinale) trying to hold out against ruthless railroad barons, Henry Fonda plays against type as a cold-blooded killer, while Charles Bronson has a starmaking performance as a mysterious, harmonica-playing hero.

7. 'Rio Bravo' (1959)
Howard Hawks and John Wayne felt that "High Noon" merited a response, a story where at least some townsfolk are brave enough come to the marshal's aid when outlaws threaten the town. But Wayne's allies here are few and unlikely -- a drunk (Dean Martin), a frail oldtimer (Walter Brennan), and a cocky kid (Ricky Nelson). As in any Hawks movie, the emphasis is as much on male bonding as it is on adventure. Dino even gets to croon a couple tunes. Still, this is as satisfying as any western ever made.

6. 'The Wild Bunch' (1969)
Sam Peckinpah's most notorious and influential revisionist western is this one, about a group of tough-guy aging outlaws (including William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Warren Oates, and Ben Johnson), feeling out of place in the newly-civilized West, who head to Mexico for one last adventure. The movie's final bloodbath, choreographed like a ballet as bullets tear bodies apart in slow motion and send blood flying, is Peckinpah's signature moment as a director, his grand statement on change in the old West, and a sequence that has been the template for the presentation of movie violence for nearly half a century now.

5. 'A Fistful of Dollars' (1964)
Here's the movie that changed westerns forever. It popularized the spaghetti western (so-called because it was directed by an Italian and shot in Europe, giving it an otherworldly, surreal quality that homegrown westerns lacked), demonstrated a cynicism about frontier morality that was new to the genre, and made a movie star out of TV cowpoke Clint Eastwood. The plot, in which Eastwood's gunslinger exploits the blood feud between two powerful families for his own ends, comes from Akira Kurosawa's "Yojimbo." In his first film as the iconic, poncho-clad, cigarillo-smoking Man With No Name, Eastwood has already perfected the squint and the soft-spoken delivery that will carry him through the rest of his long and celebrated career.

4. 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly' (1966)
In the final movie of Sergio Leone's "Dollars" trilogy, the title refers to the characters played by Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach, respectively. But nobody in the film is all that good; Eastwood's Man With No Name may be a little more honorable than the others, but that's all. The three men compete over a stash of gold, leading to the epic three-way standoff at the film's climax. Ennio Morricone adds to the agonizingly ominous atmosphere with the most iconic instrumental score in western movie history.

3. 'Unforgiven' (1992)
Clint Eastwood's Best Picture winner is also his farewell to the genre that made him famous. It's an unflinching look at the true costs of the violence usually valorized in westerns -- and indeed, throughout American culture. Eastwood plays a reformed outlaw, failing at supporting his family through honest work. He straps on guns again to chase a bounty on a couple of cowboys who disfigured a prostitute. Lending the whole enterprise some gravitas is a cast of fellow old-timers -- Morgan Freeman as Eastwood's old partner in crime, Richard Harris as an arrogant English-born gunslinger, and an Oscar-winning Gene Hackman as a town sheriff who doesn't mind resorting to violence to keep the peace. No one comes out of this situation unscathed; the violence leaves everyone either dead or damned. Even the viewer is implicated; you'll get the cathartic, climactic bloodshed you crave -- but you'll feel squeamish for wanting it and enjoying it.

2. 'Stagecoach' (1939)
Here's the movie that made John Wayne a star and John Ford the king of all western directors. Wayne's a young gunslinger eager to prove himself, and one of several passengers from diverse walks of life on a stagecoach traveling through hostile Apache territory. Ford makes his first great use here of the majestic scenery of his beloved Monument Valley, and stuntman Yakima Canutt stages some of the most hair-raising stunt work and chase shots in film history.

1. 'The Searchers' (1956)
Anyone who thinks John Wayne played the same, simple, white-hatted hero in every film needs to see this movie that demonstrates not just his range as an actor but also how willing he was to make himself unlikable. As a man who spends years on an obsessive quest to find a niece (Natalie Wood) kidnapped by Comanches, he's an unredeemable racist, one who seems as apt to kill the girl for going native as to bring her safely home. Besides being an indisputably great movie, it's also an incalculably influential one, a film that hints at the revisionist westerns to come and that served as a one-movie film school for directors like Coppola, Scorsese, and Spielberg. The final shot alone, with Wayne framed in the doorway of a home he feels banished from, has been stolen countless times by Ford's admirers. ]]>2015-05-26T09:00:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/05/26/57-greatest-westerns-ever-ranked/21186704We're at a weird place in Hollywood history, one where an original idea, executed by some of the industry's most successful writers and directors, and starring an A-list leading man, is considered an almost foolish risk -- especially in a summer season marked by blockbuster sequels that are considered safe by comparison. So it is with "Tomorrowland," Disney's big question mark of a Memorial Day weekend movie.

It was actually easier to predict how the reboot of a 33-year-old horror franchise ("Poltergeist") would open this weekend, or the sequel to a franchise whose last installment came out 30 years ago ("Mad Max: Fury Road") would open last weekend, than to guess how "Tomorrowland" would do. Indeed, predictions for "Fury Road" and "Poltergeist" (which opened this weekend with an estimated $23.0 million) were almost exactly on target. "Tomorrowland," however, opened on the low end of expectations, with an estimated $32.2 million through Sunday and a likely $40.7 million for the four-day holiday.

But maybe, instead of being surprised that pundits overestimated "Tomorrowland's" prospects, we should be surprised that the film did as well as it did. With its mysterious, futuristic sci-fi premise, "Tomorrowland" faced a number of marketing challenges, and it's not clear that Disney handled them all successfully. Indeed, the studio may have dropped the ball a couple of times. In hindsight, though, the film's rollout offers several lessons. Among them:

Secrecy is not always a good idea. You could think of this as a lemons-into-lemonade marketing approach. The premise of "Tomorrowland" is hard to explain in a sentence or a 30-second ad because of the story's complex mythology, so hiding it behind intrigue could have been a smart move. More likely, it's because secrecy has been standard operating procedure for co-screenwriter Damon Lindelof, from his days running TV's "Lost" to "Prometheus" and "Star Trek Into Darkness" (even though those films were extensions of well-known movie franchises). Either way, viewers may have been drawn in to see what all the mystery was about. But it also may have put off viewers who weren't sufficiently intrigued and would rather spend their hard-earned ticket dollars on a known premise, or those who saw the title and dismissed the film as yet another Disney movie based on a Disneyland attraction.

George Clooney is not a box office draw. Yes, he's the king of Hollywood, but he doesn't sell tickets in proportion to people's fascination with him as a celebrity gossip figure. His biggest hits were 14 and 15 years ago ("Ocean's Eleven" and "The Perfect Storm"). If you don't count his supporting role in Sandra Bullock's "Gravity," he hasn't had a movie open above $30 million since "Ocean's Thirteen" eight years ago. (That's also his last movie, other than "Gravity," to gross more than $100 million in North America.) Then again, that makes the $32.2 million premiere of "Tomorrowland" all the more impressive -- especially since Clooney is all but absent from the film for the first hour. Plus, as a charismatic actor, he seems to appeal equally to men and women, which is borne out by Disney exit-polling that shows an almost even split between male and female ticketbuyers for "Tomorrowland."

Tougher-than-expected competition. Not only did "Tomorrowland" have to compete against "Poltergeist," but it also had some very strong recent releases to contend with. Both"Pitch Perfect 2" and "Mad Max: Fury Road" opened very well last weekend, with "PP2" far outstripping expectations. Both held up strongly this weekend, too, with"PP2" close on "Tomorrowland"'s heels (it earned an estimated $30.3 million) and "Fury Road" taking in an estimated $23.9 million. Along with "Avengers: Age of Ultron," which crossed the $400 million threshold in domestic sales in just its fourth weekend of release, that's a lot of well-known and well-liked properties for an enigma like "Tomorrowland" to go up against.

Memorial Day openings are not a license to print money. Sure, last year, "X-Men: Days of Future Past" enjoyed a $110.6 million opening, but that was a well-reviewed sequel to a well-established franchise, not to mention a film whose casting brought together fan favorites from the older and newer installments. On the other hand, last Memorial Day also saw the dismal debut of "Blended," the third romantic-comedy collaboration from Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore. It premiered with just $17.7 million, about a third of what their "50 First Dates" had opened with a decade earlier. Then again, reviews for that movie were terrible, and even critic-ignoring Sandler fans smelled a stinker. The moral of the story: Not even a four-day summer-kickoff holiday weekend can save a poorly made movie.

The "select" Thursday preview. Thursday-night openings have become a standard way for Hollywood to boost the weekend premiere tallies, offer an early gauge of viewer interest, and generate additional word-of-mouth from those moviegoers enthusiastic enough to want to be the first to see the film. The "Tomorrowland" Thursday screenings, however, were unusual in that, instead of taking place in all or most of the movie's 3,972 venues, Disney held them in just 701 theaters. The studio referred to this as a "special limited engagement," with the theaters supposedly limited to those palatial movie screens on which director Brad Bird's spectacle could enjoy the best possible screening conditions. (This sort of selectivity reminded me of the scene in "This Is Spinal Tap," where the band's manager is asked whether the fact that the group is playing smaller venues on its current tour means the musicians are less popular, and he spins, "No, it just means their appeal is becoming more selective.")

Yes, there could be some fanboy-servicing involved in just screening the movie in theaters where its visuals will look best (again, to get the movie's biggest potential fans a chance to generate the best possible word-of-mouth). And there could also be some obfuscation on Disney's part; the theater count was so small that box-office observers couldn't fairly compare it's Thursday-night take of $725,000 to the Thursday debuts of blockbusters that opened on four or five times as many screens. Then again, "Tomorrowland" could have earned an extra $2 or $3 million if it had played on all screens available to it on Thursday night. Did the studio not want to spend the money to launch a full Thursday premiere, or was it just worried that the numbers wouldn't be that impressive? It didn't help word-of-mouth much. The movie earned a B grade at Cinemascore, which indicates a less-than-enthusiastic set of recommendations from early viewers.

"Tomorrowland" has been in the making for at least five years. That would seem to be plenty of time for a studio that's as good at marketing as Disney is to come up with a foolproof strategy. But these days, nothing is foolproof there unless it has the names Marvel or Pixar or "Star Wars" attached. Anything beyond that comfort zone, apparently, is a steep challenge.
]]>2015-05-25T12:00:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/05/25/disney-tomorrowland-box-office/21186129In retrospect, the popularity of "Braveheart" seems like a foregone conclusion.

The movie, which opened 20 years ago this week (on May 24, 1995), won five Oscars, two of them for star Mel Gibson (in his roles as producer and director). The Best Picture winner thrilled audiences as well as critics with its exciting battle scenes, stirring speeches, and sweeping historical narrative of 13th-century Scottish independence fighter William Wallace. At its center is a charismatic performance by the "Lethal Weapon" star, then at the height of his popularity as a box office draw and action hero. It grossed $210 million worldwide. Two decades later, it's still the most famous movie ever made about Scotland.

Still, even though the movie has been a staple for 20 years, there may be plenty you don't know about it, from its generous liberties with history to the R-rated pranks the director pulled on his leading lady.

1. "Braveheart" was Randall Wallace's first produced screenplay, but he'd done a lot of interesting work before that. He'd been a martial arts instructor, the manager of an animal show at Opryland in Nashville, a singer/songwriter, and a TV scriptwriter.

2. Wallace was inspired to write the screenplay by a trip to Scotland to explore his own roots. He is not related to William Wallace, but he was inspired by the famous rebel's life story.

3. Mel Gibson took the script to his then-home studio, Warner Bros., with the hope to direct the project. The studio agreed to fund the production only if Gibson agreed to headline a fourth "Lethal Weapon" movie. Gibson turned Warners down -- though three years later, he did make "Lethal Weapon 4."

4. Paramount agreed to make the film, but as insurance, it split the $72 million budget with 20th Century Fox; Fox was given rights to international distribution in return. The studio also asked Gibson to star in the movie, even though he felt he was a decade too old, at 38, to play a historical figure in his 20s.

5. Gibson shot some of the movie on location in Scotland, in places like Loch Leven and Glen Coe, where "Highlander" had been filmed a decade earlier. The set for Wallace's village was built in the Glen Nevis valley. (After the set was dismantled, the parking lot the filmmakers built remained, and today, it's known as the Braveheart Car Park.)

6. The rest of the film, however, was shot in Ireland, in and around Dublin. That irked some purists, but hey, tax breaks. Ireland also provided army reserve soldiers to be used as extras. Between 1600 and 2000 extras appear in the Battle of Stirling Bridge sequence, which took six weeks to shoot on Curragh Plain in County Kildare.

7. Much of Randall Wallace's screenplay is based on an epic poem about William Wallace's exploits by a 15th-century minstrel named Blind Harry. It's a poem inspired by legends about Wallace that Blind Harry compiled about 170 years after Wallace's death, and it's full of exaggerations and deeds that historians have attributed to people other than Wallace.

8. In real life, the nickname "Braveheart" actually referred to Robert the Bruce (played in the movie by Angus Macfadyen), not William Wallace.

9. "Braveheart" depicts Wallace as a peasant farmer, but historians say he was a member of the gentry as the son of a minor landowner.

10. As in the film, Wallace did become a rebel leader after the murder of his wife -- but there's no evidence that the English ever practiced the policy of primae noctic -- having lords rape the virginal brides of serfs on their wedding nights.

11. Was Edward II (played by Peter Hanly) actually gay, as the movie indicates? Historians say most likely, though he also did father five children by two different women, a fact the movie ignores. He was also robust and strong like his father, not a skinny weakling, as the film portrays him. And the sequence where his father tosses his son's lover out the window to his death? Never happened.

12. The film's portrayal of Edward II as a frail sissy, and the seemingly gratuitous defenestration scene, led to criticisms of Gibson's movie as homophobic. Gay-rights activists threatened to protest the film outside theaters in major cities. Gibson defended the window scene, saying, "The king didn't throw that character out the window because he's gay. He did it because the king's a psychopath."

13. In real life, William Wallace could not have wooed and impregnated Princess Isabella (Sophie Marceau). At the time, she was a three-year-old girl living in France. She did marry Edward II, but after he was king, not when he was still Prince of Wales. Their son,Edward III, was born seven years after Wallace's death.

14. Scottish soldiers at the time would not have worn kilts; that didn't happen for another four centuries or so. Also, there's no record that they wore the blue war paint, though ancient tribes in Scotland a thousand years earlier had done so.

15. Oh, and there's no mention, in history or legend, of the Scots "mooning" the British at the Battle of Stirling Bridge.

16. Gibson defended scenes like the above by noting that the movie was so grim and bloody that it needed some comic relief. "If this movie didn't have some funny bits, it'd be unbearable," he told the Dallas Observer. "The audience would f---in' hang itself."

17. On set, Gibson furthered his reputation as a prankster of sorts. Marceau told Entertainment Weekly that Gibson, during downtime, used to surprise her by flashing his penis at her -- his way of lightening the mood.

18. To prevent the film from getting an NC-17 rating, Gibson had to trim some of the battle scenes. It ultimately got an R-rating for "brutal medieval warfare." As for the gruesome execution scene, which accurately portrays Wallace as being castrated, disemboweled, hanged, drawn and quartered -- apparently, the ratings board had no problem with that.

19. The film grossed $75.6 million in North America and another $134.8 million abroad. (No doubt Paramount suits were kicking themselves for selling the foreign rights to Fox.) It stayed in theatrical release for nearly 13 months.

20. Purists also grumbled at the use of Irish uilleann pipes, rather than Scottish bagpipes, on James Horner's score. But the movie's soundtrack was popular enough to spawn a second album of instrumentals from the film. Two years later, Horner reused one of the melodies (and a lot more uilleann pipes) on his soundtrack for "Titanic."

21. The five Oscars "Braveheart" won were for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Makeup, and Best Sound Effects Editing. It was nominated for five additional awards: Best Original Screenplay, Best Costumes, Best Editing, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Score.

22. "Braveheart" is generally credited with generating a boom in Scottish tourism, especially to the battle sites depicted in the film.

23. At the Wallace Monument in Stirling, Scotland, a 13-foot sandstone sculpture of Gibson as Wallace was placed in the parking lot in 1997. After being defaced several times, the statue was returned to its sculptor, Tom Church, in 2009, with the local tourism board stating the move was necessary to make room for the monument's new visitors' center.

24. Randall Wallace went on to continued success in Hollywood. He wrote and directed "The Man in the Iron Mask," Gibson's "We Were Soldiers," and "Heaven Is For Real." He also wrote the screenplay to "Pearl Harbor" and directed "Secretariat." Gibson has said he's working on a script with Wallace for a Viking movie that has yet to go into production.

25. According to stolen Sony e-mails published by Wikileaks, the studio has been developing a sequel to "Braveheart" called "Lion Rampant," which would center on Robert the Bruce. Tom Hiddleston would supposedly play the lead, while Sophie Marceau and Brendan Gleeson (Hamish) would reprise their roles from the original film.
]]>2015-05-24T09:00:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/05/24/braveheart-facts/21186274Sunday night, viewers had a choice: Watch Sansa Stark's horrifying wedding night on HBO's "Game of Thrones," or watch Don Draper and a host of other characters find some measure of tidy fulfillment on the series finale of "Mad Men." Viewers seemed dissatisfied with both, judging by how they proceeded to set the Internet ablaze.

The outrage over Sansa's rape (with new husband Ramsay Bolton forcing himself on her while making her erstwhile stepbrother Theon Greyjoy watch) stems not just from the fact that the show's writers gave Sansa the fate meted out to another character in the books, or even that the violence was especially lurid or graphic. (Indeed, by "Game of Thrones" standards, the scene was fairly brief and discreet.) Rather, it was that Sansa has been a fan favorite, a decent person who's witnessed many ghastly events and lost several family members, but who herself had been spared the kinds of horrors routinely visited on other characters, especially female characters -- until now. Viewers somehow thought Sansa would be immune from such torments, though real life doesn't work that way and neither does thoughtfully-crafted TV. "Game of Thrones" seldom plays that way but instead routinely pulls the rug out from under the characters and from under fans who expect it to honor narrative conventions.

As for "Mad Men," the much-debated ending, which saw Don Draper find enlightenment and ambiguous self-realization at an Esalen-like California retreat, viewers felt ambivalent. Did Don -- a character whom Jon Hamm made likable and alluring, but who also spent seven seasons behaving self-destructively, treating those who loved him with cruel callousness, and leaving those who depended on him in the lurch -- deserve his redemption? For that matter, did Pete or Roger, two characters who were often even bigger cads than Don? Did they deserve fulfillment more than Joan, who, as always, was forced to choose between love and career? And on the other end of the spectrum, were we supposed to find Betty's lung cancer a comeuppance for her years of maternal coldness, or were we now supposed to feel sorry for her or see her as a trouper, defiantly puffing a cigarette in the face of the abyss? As with "Game of Thrones," "Mad Men" also routinely sabotaged expectations, so much so that, when some characters ended up happy, we didn't buy it, and when others did not, we were disappointed.

In a way, the age of antihero TV has ruined us. We want our favorite characters to be happy because we find them charismatic and charming (which is why we've invested so many hours of our lives following them in the first place). But we also want them to suffer because karma (or, in literary terms, poetic justice) demands it. Think of lovable-but-lethal mob boss Tony Soprano (on the series where "Mad Men" creator Matthew Weiner cut his teeth) and how many "Sopranos" fans were disappointed that the series cut to black without showing for certain whether Tony got whacked (and punished for all his crimes) or found happiness with his family over a plate of onion rings. Think of Atlantic City crime boss Nucky Thompson on "Boardwalk Empire" (a show created by former "Sopranos" writer Terence Winter, who must have learned from the fan complaints over the "Sopranos" finale), who did get whacked, in the series' final seconds, which turned out to be an abrupt and unsatisfying moment. Or think of meth kingpin and doting dad Walter White, the "Breaking Bad" protagonist who is about the only recent antihero protagonist who managed to pull off both the violent death his crimes merited and the redemption that still-sympathetic fans wanted for him.

No one on "Mad Men" merited violent retribution, but a lot of viewers wanted or at least expected Don Draper to die. He seemed congenitally unable to find for himself the happiness he easily sold to others, and he'd hit what seemed to be rock bottom, bounce back, and then find an even deeper bottom. During Sunday's finale, he seemed paralyzed with despair and cut off from the world. The show could have ended there, with Don's implied suicide, and it would have felt awful but appropriate. Instead, Don had a breakthrough in the last minutes of the series, and his sudden happiness seemed suspect and too neat. Whether the ambiguous final seconds indicated he's be pursuing hippie bliss in California or returning to work for the giant New York ad agency that had swallowed his firm and find creative fulfillment by creating that classic Coke commercial, his happiness seemed bound to be short-lived. Had he really learned enough about himself from his empathetic response to poor Leonard that we could be sure Don wouldn't sabotage himself again?

The truth is, as much as we may have yearned to see Don find a happy ending, it was more satisfying to watch him suffer. Not because he deserved it but because it made for better drama. And the same is true of Sansa and the rest of the "Game of Thrones" characters. Yes, the suffering that George R.R. Martin and showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss visit upon them is extreme, but that's the kind of world Westeros is.

Maybe a better question than "Why do characters we like have to suffer?" would be, "Why do we find their suffering entertaining?" After all, "Game of Thrones" has shown characters suffering through presentation that's more agonizingly drawn out, to the point where the viewer feels implicated in the character's torture. (Think of all that Ramsay has done to poor Theon, including castration.) The Sansa scene, too, for all its relative brevity and discretion, was also excruciating for many fans to watch. And yet, "Game of Thrones" serves up this sort of thing to us every week as entertainment. A few weeks ago, it looked like we were going to have to watch Mance Rayder get burned alive until Jon Snow spared him (and us) his misery by shooting him with an arrow.

Do we enjoy watching suffering meted out to the deserving and undeserving alike because we're sadists, because we find violence cathartic? Maybe. But maybe we've been conditioned -- not just by television, but by our culture in general, by religion, and by history -- to believe that suffering has a moral purpose, a lesson to teach.

And maybe that's the way to respond to scenes like Sansa's rape, to hope that it shapes her character in a way that will pay off later. That's placing an awful lot of trust in Benioff and Weiss, but the alternative is to think that Sansa's anguish is for naught. Pain ultimately led to some measure of enlightenment for all the "Mad Men" characters, whether we rooted for them to find it or not; maybe it'll do the same for Sansa, Tyrion, Jon Snow, Daenerys, and other "Game of Thrones" fan favorites.

Perhaps the lesson here, in drama as in life, is to take everything that happens as a character-building experience, whether it's deserved or not. As Clint Eastwood's William Munny says in "Unforgiven," "Deserve's got nothing to do with it."
]]>2015-05-22T12:30:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/05/22/age-of-antihero-tv-has-ruined-us-all/21184826
"The future isn't what it used to be," Yogi Berra reportedly said. George Clooney expresses a similar sentiment in Brad Bird's "Tomorrowland," the new sci-fi summer blockbuster opening this weekend.

The film centers on a teen (Britt Robertson) who travels through time and space to a glittering, futuristic city full of wonder (and jet packs!). It's inspired by the kind of old-fashioned, shiny-surfaced optimism for the future that resulted in such dream utopias as the Disneyland attraction of the title. While "Tomorrowland" isn't a traditional time-travel film, it does take audiences on an inspired trip to the future. In honor of the film's release, we've ranked 35 of Hollywood's best trips through time.

Like our picks? Have a few of your own? Sound off below! ]]>2015-05-21T15:30:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/05/21/best-time-travel-movies-ever-ranked/21184148
David Letterman didn't invent the top 10 list, but it was his most durable comedy bit. Maybe we won't miss it after he airs his final episode of "The Late Show" on May 20, but there's so much we will miss.

After all, even if you're tired of hearing how Dave changed the face of comedy and set the template for all late-night hosts who've followed, it's nonetheless true. He managed to keep the plates spinning for 33 years, three years longer than his idol, Johnny Carson, and anyone who departs after that long is going to leave a gaping void. So, in Dave's honor, here are the Top 10 Things We'll Miss after he's gone. ]]>2015-05-20T10:00:00+00:00http://news.moviefone.com/2015/05/20/top-10-things-well-miss-about-david-letterman/